How To Read A Histogram Graph

The x axis is the horizontal axis and the y axis is the vertical axis.

How to read a histogram graph. 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 middle or 18 grey. They can be found on some camera settings and on your photo editing software. Both give you essential information to reading the histogram. The x axis will tell you the ranges into which the data have been grouped.

You can think of a histogram as representing a range of pure black on the left to pure white on the right. A histogram is a useful graph that shows you how a pictures brightness correlates to the number of pixels in it. In lightroom you can find the histogram at the top of the right hand panel. Histograms most often show up as blue red or green peaks depending on which tones are the most present in your photo.

The darkest tones are on the left of the graph with the brightest on the right. In the histogram of salaries above those groups are 24 32 32 40 40 48 etc. Read the axes of the graph. In this article i hope to explain what it is and how to read a histogram.

The right side of the chart represents highlights with the left edge portraying shadows. There are 256 points along the width of the histogram. They start at black numbered 0 at the left edge and continue to point f white at the right. Click the triangle or tap the j key to show shadow clipping and the clipped shadows will turn blue so you can see them in the photo.

Many histograms show you the results of the frequency of an occurrence and will have a y axis indicating frequency. The general idea behind a histogram is to divide the data set into groups of equal length which allows us to see the patterns in the data instead of the detailed information we would get from what is basically a list of numbers.