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Histogram and Spot Metering

Lesson 4 from: How to Capture and Edit Landscapes in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

4. Histogram and Spot Metering

Which shadows and highlights make an interesting photo? Jared shows you how to use your histogram and spot metering to help you read the exposure of your image.

Lesson Info

Histogram and Spot Metering

So as the sun is rising, you can see that it's cresting on my cactus. It's lighting up my rocks in front of me. You're always gonna find that you have a more interesting and beautiful texture to your photograph if the shadows are coming towards you and the highlights are kind of on the back side or the smallest portion of the photograph. So what I'm doing here is I'm looking at the photograph and I'm trying to get the correct exposure as the sun comes up, and the thing that I'm paying attention to is the histogram. You always want to make sure that your histogram is available. You can see that I've got a histogram here on my screen itself. A histogram is simply a graph that shows me how many pixels on my image sensor are being exposed as a highlight and how many are exposed as a shadow. So there's no perfect histogram. It should look exactly like your photo. If it's dark, you should see most of the piles of the graph over on the left-hand side. If it's a bright photograph, you should s...

ee most of the piles of data over on the right-hand side. If you turn your camera on spot metering mode, you can then take the little circle that's in the very middle of the viewfinder. It's also usually on the back of your screen, as well. And point at individual tones, shadows, highlights, and you can register whether or not they are going to over or underexpose. Simply by looking at the meter inside of my viewfinder, I can see the needle go back and forth, and if it doesn't go all the way off of my graph, I'm fine. And if I point at a shadow and it doesn't go all the way off the other side of the graph, then I'm fine.

Ratings and Reviews

James Kitt
 

I wish more people would present this way! Each step from beginning to end demonstrated in short, concise and useful actions. Every tool and technique is something that I either use, (now better) or will start using because I now understand how to use it efficiently. I highly recommend this course!

Fauzan Pojam
 

Finally, a video tutorial that taught me what I've known on basic level and truly explore how to use it properly and what everything means. I've been waiting for something like this for awhile now. Greatly improves my technique now so thank you for this!

Angie Purcell
 

Great class wi with tons of helpful hints for both Lightroom and Photoshop.

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