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Camera histogram is a graphical representation of the pixels exposed in a photo image. The histogram is a very helpful tool to accurately assess an exposure on your camera.
The left side of the graph represents the blacks or shadows,
the right side represents the highlights or bright areas and the middle section is mid-tones.
How high the peaks reach represent the number of pixels in that particular tone. Each tone from 0-255 (o being black and 255 being white) is one pixel wide on the graph, so imagine the histogram as a bar graph all squished together with no spaces between each bar. We can tell an image is well exposed if it reaches fully from edge to edge without a space on one side of the graph, and isn’t heavily going up one side or the other. In an ideal world, it should just touch the left and right edges, and not spill up the sides, with a nice arch up in the center.
However that doesn’t always apply in every situation, for every scene. This is an example for a dark stage subject, it is not wrong it is just more shifted to the right to represent the tones of the subject that is a black background.
This is another example for a light subject with mostly light tones in the scene and few dark areas. See how it is shifted to the right now versus the dark subject.
How can you tell the image has exposure problem? When your graph is shifted too far in one direction or the other so that it does not even touch the other edge – that means you can safely shift your exposure to cover more of the range of tones.
What do the spikes up the sides mean? For example, if you are photographing a scene with extreme contrasts such as in a concert with deep shadows.. This graph shows an image with extreme contrast, lots of blacks, a spike of white and not much in the middle. that is OK for most situations.
