Holy histo!

[timmyquest]

Not a stunning picture or anything but isnt this pretty much what the "ideal" histogram looks like?

Kinda cool, i stepped outside, looked at the light/setting and made the changes to my camera and it spat out this.

I'm slowly reaching the point where my own eyes are good enough to determain exposier settings.

http://www.antiwall.com/histo.jpg

[richard_a]

If there is a lot of snow in the picture yes.........

You must have increased exposure compensation to at least +1 to get a nice exposure on the log pile. Good work.

[ilya]

No no no. There are no ideal histograms. Case and point, you blew out all highlights in the snow. :cry:

See this tutorial -

http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml

[chris.bailey]

Now I may be wrong but I would think that histo was slightly ott on the highlights and blowing a few off of the brightness scale. Snow scenes tend towards the bright end of the scale and are easy to blow

[scottbergerphoto]

I have to agree with the other posters. It looks like you clipped the histogram on the right and lost detail in the snow. You should try to avoid hitting the 255. The link above to Luminous Landcape is instructive.
Scott

[PacAce]

I have to agree with the other posters. It looks like you clipped the histogram on the right and lost detail in the snow. You should try to avoid hitting the 255. The link above to Luminous Landcape is instructive.
Scott

Well, I would say that it all depends on what the original poster was after. If he exposes for the snow, then obviously he's going to end up with a very dark pile of wood logs with hardly any details. And that may not have been what he wanted. Given the choice of one or the other I, too, would go for the detail in the log than in the snow. OK, I might have gone a tad more to the left but not much more than that but it still won't be enough to bring out all the details in the snow, if any.

[G3]

Actually, I think that this could have been exposed a little less to the right to keep from completely blowing out the detail in the snow, then bring out detail in the shadow areas with curves. This is exposed so far to the right that there is no way to recover the highlights detail. Sometimes, however, in snow on a bright day, it is impossible to find a balance because there are just too many f-stops of contrast between the snow and the shadows. You only have about 5 1/2 stops or so to work with. If the difference between the spot readings of the logs and the spot readings of the snow exceed that, then you likely won't be able to capture the full range.

[Avarond]

You only have about 5 1/2 stops or so to work with.


Would this cause noise in shadow areas if you shot a sunset and exposed everything for the highlights? If it is extreme ranges from light to dark almost like shooting snow.

[robertwgross]

That is why they invented graduated neutral density filters, so that you can darken the bright parts of the scene a little and leave the dark parts alone.

In essense, if the scene has too many f-stops of range in it, you can reduce the number.

---Bob Gross---

[G3]

That is why they invented graduated neutral density filters, so that you can darken the bright parts of the scene a little and leave the dark parts alone.

In essense, if the scene has too many f-stops of range in it, you can reduce the number.

---Bob Gross---

That's a fact. Photoshop can do a lot after the fact, but it can't fix everything.

[ChrisNardone]

That is why they invented graduated neutral density filters, so that you can darken the bright parts of the scene a little and leave the dark parts alone.

In essense, if the scene has too many f-stops of range in it, you can reduce the number.

---Bob Gross---

True. Couldn't you also decrease the range by using a flash on the logs and shortening the exposure?

[G3]

That is why they invented graduated neutral density filters, so that you can darken the bright parts of the scene a little and leave the dark parts alone.

In essense, if the scene has too many f-stops of range in it, you can reduce the number.

---Bob Gross---

True. Couldn't you also decrease the range by using a flash on the logs and shortening the exposure?

I think using a camera mounted flash would only blow out the whites even more, or as you said you could decrease the exposure by using a faster shutter or smaller aperture, but there's no way (IMHO) to capture the entire range with a naked lens. Something is going to be either underexposed or overexposed. Theres so much tonal range in this scene that the only way to capture it is to filter out some of the highlight areas and expose for the logs.

[Jim_T]

Looking at the EXIF data and Timmyquest's message.. It looks like he was shooting in full manual and trying to determine the exposure settings by eyballing the scene..

It is terribly blown out :)

Shooting snow in 'P', 'Av', 'Tv' or automatic mode usually underexposes slightly resulting in grey snow.. You have to add a bit of exposure compensation to get it to turn out white..

Without a light meter, it's incredibly hard to expose such a bright image.. What has to be done in this case is to shoot and look at the histogram.. Then keep shooting and checking until the white isn't slammed up against the right side.. Since digital pictures are free.. You can take as many as you want :)

[timmyquest]

Wow, you guys really got into this.

I just remember reading somewhere that the "ideal" exposier is a bell shape near the middle of the histogram.

This was the one and only shot i took and i was suprised as this was the first picture since my 300D to get such a bell shape.

I really dont use the histogram for anything then compairing it to other pictures i've taken during that shoot. If you shoot a dark room even if a dark picture is desired the histo (acording to that "ideal bell shape") says it's wrong, if you are shooting a black guy on a white bed who is wearing a white suite, well...the histogram would most likely not be that "bell shape". My point is that even though i'm new (or perhaps because i'm new) to digital photography, i dont really rely on the histo. It's a nifty/nice tool, but so are lawn mowers with 60 inch decks...not like you have a real use for it though :-D.

[mjordan]

You guys are making it too difficult. The ideal situation to fix this scene is to meter for the snow so you have white with detail. Then, wait till the snow melts, meter for the logs so you have shadow with detail... then merge them together in Photoshop. Perfect picture. :D


But I agree, the snow is blown out according to this histogram. You don't want the highlights smashed up against the right wall.

Mike

[ilya]

Wow, you guys really got into this.

I just remember reading somewhere that the "ideal" exposier is a bell shape near the middle of the histogram.

This was the one and only shot i took and i was suprised as this was the first picture since my 300D to get such a bell shape.

I really dont use the histogram for anything then compairing it to other pictures i've taken during that shoot. If you shoot a dark room even if a dark picture is desired the histo (acording to that "ideal bell shape") says it's wrong, if you are shooting a black guy on a white bed who is wearing a white suite, well...the histogram would most likely not be that "bell shape". My point is that even though i'm new (or perhaps because i'm new) to digital photography, i dont really rely on the histo. It's a nifty/nice tool, but so are lawn mowers with 60 inch decks...not like you have a real use for it though :-D.

Timmy, the histogram is your friend. Please read that article on LL.

The "histo" tells you what your eye and the little tiny screen on the back of the camera can't tell you. That is where you are on the dynamic range. That range covers is about 5 stops of light. Go outside of that, as you've done here, and a) if you're going off the chart to the right you are overexposing some part of the image. When that happens, you lose detail, and usually you can't recover overexposed areas. b) go to the left, and you've underexposed some part of the image.

There are photographs that use less then 1 stop (say if you're shooting night sky and the moon), some that use 5 stops, and there are some that use 8 stops. But there is no "ideal" histogram, there are well distributed histo's across the range, and there are histo's that tell you that you've gone outside of the dynamic range. Your snow and logs were probably 7-8 stops apart.

If you had read the histo correctly after the first shot, you'd know that you overexposed some part of the image. Then you could have:

— used balanced fill flash on the foreground
— ran to the store for a graduated neutral density filter
— taken multiple exposures and merged them digitally (read article)
— gone back inside to watch tv

[scottbergerphoto]

Ilya is correct. The histogram is a representation of the 256 possible tones in your picture. 0=black, 255=bright white. Your histogram can't show tones that aren't in the picture. It's really a bar graph that shows the amount of each tone between 0 and 255. What you see on the LCD is the top of the colums connected. I suggest you read the link at Luminous Landscape.
Scott

[G3]

Wow, you guys really got into this.

I just remember reading somewhere that the "ideal" exposier is a bell shape near the middle of the histogram.

This was the one and only shot i took and i was suprised as this was the first picture since my 300D to get such a bell shape.

I really dont use the histogram for anything then compairing it to other pictures i've taken during that shoot. If you shoot a dark room even if a dark picture is desired the histo (acording to that "ideal bell shape") says it's wrong, if you are shooting a black guy on a white bed who is wearing a white suite, well...the histogram would most likely not be that "bell shape". My point is that even though i'm new (or perhaps because i'm new) to digital photography, i dont really rely on the histo. It's a nifty/nice tool, but so are lawn mowers with 60 inch decks...not like you have a real use for it though :-D.

There is a lot of misinformation floating around on the web about how to use a histogram. As suggested by a couple of people earlier in this thread, I would recommend reading the tutorial at Luminous Landscape. It may very well be in a lot of cases that you would expose for a "bell shaped curve" pretty much centered in the chart, especially if you don't do any post-processing. However, that's going to depend entirely on where in the tonal range of the image sensor your subject matter falls. That's not what you have in this photo anyway. Yes, there is a bell-shaped curve in your histogram, but there is also a lot of information that is all the way to the right and exceeding the limits to the white side. You have to learn to read the histogram correctly if you are going to try to use it. There is way too much information involved to try to explain it in this thread. Go study the tutorial. It will help immensely.