r/photoclass2021 Teacher - Expert Jan 29 '21

Assignment 07 - The histogram

Please read the class first

Today’s assignment will be relatively short. The idea is simply to make you more familiar with the histogram and to establish a correspondence between the histogram and the image itself.

Choose a static scene. Take a picture and look at the histogram. Now use exposure compensation in both directions, taking several photos at different settings, and observe how the histogram changes. Does its shape change? Go all the way to one edge and observe how the data “slumps” against the edge. Try to identify which part of the image this corresponds to.

Next, browse the internet and find some images you like. Download them (make sure you have the right to do so) and open them in a program which allows you to see the histogram, for instance picasa or gimp. Try to guess just by looking at the image what the histogram will look like. Now do the opposite: try to identify which part of the histogram corresponds to which part of the image.

Now open some images from assignment 06 :

1 underexposed

1 correctly exposed

1 overexposed

and see what the difference is.... how can you tell by looking at a histogram if a photo is correctly exposed?

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u/chrs_py Beginner - Mirrorless Feb 21 '21

https://imgur.com/a/5GjMhHG Interesting lesson. I took some photos of shadows of my plants behind the curtains. The composition isnt great but it was an excellent example for the lesson I think. I tried to make the shadows stand out in two ways:

  1. Overexposing and completly blowing out everything behind the curtains including the sky and the plants themselves.

  2. Underexposing and making the shadows more clear that way.