HISTOGRAMS in photoshop

Histogram and Exposure Compensation

3 min readNov 17, 2022

How can you tell by looking at a histogram if a photo is correctly exposed?

You can tell that an image is well-exposed if it’s balanced toward the center of the frame, with no obvious skew. Ideally, the graph is spread across the entire histogram, from edge to edge — but without edge peaks, which indicate clipping.

Left-skewed histogram can indicate underexposure, as the shot is full of dark pixels. A right-skewed histogram can indicate overexposure, as the shot is full of light pixels. And a balanced, generally centered histogram tends to indicate a beautifully detailed, well-exposed image, because the shot is full of midtones. A histogram with peaks pressed up against the graph “walls” indicates a loss of information, which is nearly always bad.

White balance

White balance is used to adjust colors to match the color of the light source so that white objects appear white.

https://photographylife.com/definition/white-balance

Histogram

A histogram is a graph that measures the brightness of an image by representing the frequency of each tone as a value on a bar chart. The horizontal axis moves from pure black on the left side of the histogram, through shadows, midtones, and highlights, all the way to the brightest white on the right side.

https://photographylife.com/understanding-histograms-in-photography

Bracketing

Bracketing is the process of shooting the same image, shot, or scene multiple times using different camera settings resulting in different exposures.

https://expertphotography.com › bracketing-photography

Exposure Compensation

Exposure compensation basically helps you override automatic exposure adjustments your camera makes in situations with uneven light distribution, filters, non-standard processing, or underexposure or overexposure.

https://photographylife.com › what-is-exposure-compe…