V1.02
Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D300
Page 268
data, and is not particularly important (other than to identify
what’s happening with a particular tone vis-à-vis others). The
horizontal axis goes from black at the left side (luminance
value of 0) to white on the right (e.g. luminance value of 255
for 8-bit data).
Note: Nikon took a step backwards with the basic histogram. The
white-on-white presentation makes it difficult to ascertain
blown highlights because any spike at the right edge looks
essentially the same as the right-hand border marker (if you
look carefully, blown highlights are a teeny bit wider than
the border). Previous Nikons used a yellow-on-white style
that made it easy to see luminance blowouts. Curiously, the
old style histogram
is
possible on a D300, but you have to
set Custom Setting #F1 to use the center press of the
Direction pad to pull up the histogram. Then you get this:
It’s much easier to see what’s happening at the edges of the
histogram with the yellow data versus the red borders.
So what does a well-exposed image look like? It’s actually
easier to define what constitutes a poorly exposed image.
Here are some things to watch for:
• Most pixels skewed to the right of the histogram
. If a
significant number of pixel values exist at the extreme
right edge, it’s likely the shot is overexposed. Histograms
that are “right-heavy” make it difficult to control highlight
detail. Check the Highlights display to see if you’ve blown
out any highlight detail.
