Subtitles of the Movie

The histogram is the center of the universe in photography; even in film photography. When your images are scanned, you're going to be dealing with the intensity of light and that is measured with a histogram. You've got a histogram in your mid and upper-range DSLR and you've got one in Photoshop and you need to learn how to use it. The only thing a histogram measures is the intensity of the light. Is it too bright? Is it too dark? All of these are answered by the histogram. Now, there's a mountain of information on this subject and entire books have been written on it, but I'm only going to give you the basic information you need to take good pictures and produce good results in Photoshop. Now, I can't tell you how many times in my workshops there's always one person who's all enthusiastic about taking pictures and landscapes. They're the first to the next location, they always want to stay the longest, but inevitably they get what I call analysis paralysis. That is they agonize over aperture settings, shutter speeds, ISO settings, etcetera, etcetera, constant questions about what should I set my camera at for the correct exposure? My answer is always whatever your histogram says it should be. Shoot for the histogram, not the settings. Now, here's what a histogram looks like. Ok? The area on the right measures the brightness in the image. The area on the left measures the darkness in the image in simple terms. Your goal is to expose the image with a histogram that goes as far to the right as you can without crashing up against the right border. Now, when you do that, it's called clipping the brights or blowing out your image. When you clip the lighter areas of the image, you're losing image detail and there's no color information left in that portion of the image. Now, sometimes it's ok to do that as we will see later, but your goal in most cases, especially in portrait and landscape photography, is to expose the sensor with enough light to keep the noise down but not too bright to lose image information. Now, it's a balancing act. You got to learn in order to get consistently good results in your photography. Forget settings. When shooting, take a picture, look at the histogram, make an adjustment. Take a picture, look at the picture, make an adjustment. Ok? Just keep up that process until your histogram looks right. Just shoot for the histogram. Now, I our next movie we're going to take a look at examples of good exposure and bad exposure.