In the previous articles, we took a look at how we can manipulate the light that enters the camera using Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO. In this article we are going to look at the characteristics of light that we have captured.
Take any image, Shadows represent the darker parts of the image.
Highlights represent the brighter parts of the image.
And midtones represent the grey area between the highlights and the Shadows.
There is a limit to the amount of brightness and darkness a camera can capture. If you go past this limit, it can blow out the highlights or crush the shadows of the image. What this essentially means is that, the pixels become completely white or black respectively and all the information will be lost. So when you are capturing light you need to make sure that you’re not overexposing or underexposing the image more than this limit.
So how do you do that?
This is where something called as Histogram Comes into play.
Histogram is a graphical representation of how the light is distributed in an image. The left side of the histogram represents the darker parts of the image(blacks and shadows) and the right side represents the brighter parts of the image(Highlights and Whites) and the centre of the histogram represents the grey area or the midtones. In the above example, the image is properly exposed as there is no peaking in the left or the right extremes.
If you take a look at the above histogram, we can clearly say that the image is overexposed as the graph is not balanced but is right weighted. And we can also say that the highlights of the image is clipped as there is a peak on the right extreme.
And if you take a look at the above histogram, it is very clear that the image is underexposed as the graph is left weighted and the shadows are crushed since there is a peak on the left extreme.
I hope this article helped you understand how to differentiate between the shadows, highlights and midtones of an image and also how to use the histogram.
See you next week in another article.
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