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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GonyeaGalleries" data-source="post: 796027" data-attributes="member: 1690">Definitely a great post. I've been doing this from the beginning, and it's good to see this subject brought up again, because it does indeed prevent a lot of wasted shots. I never go by the EV number anyway. The histogram is an awesome tool!Also, I'd like to add a few other tips related to the histogram:1. Be careful when shooting pictures that have a small area that is very bright (such as white birds or boats in a shot) because you might still get a nice bell curve, but there will be a tall, narrow spike on the right that signals you have burnt-out highlights.2. With three- color histograms, if you clip the blue channel (blue histogram with a big right spike) and the other channels look ok, you will have a cyan (nasty!) sky on sunny days. 3. Likewise, when shooting sunsets, red is more likely to clip with a right spike, causing ugly yellow or red sploches around the sun.4. If a shot looks good in the histogram(s), also check it in "highlight mode" (if your camera supports this playback option). Anything overexposed will repeatedly blink at you. I've used this to pick out washed-out areas in clouds, white birds, or boats, to name a few possibilities. Then I re-shoot down a half-stop or full stop, if necessary to capture that detail.5. Another thing you can do to get better histograms is to (if your camera allows it) adjust your contrast. Usually, this is a custom setting, but if you have a scene with a wide dynamic range (the range of brightnesses), you can often prevent the dilemma of having to decide whether to overexpose highlights or black-out shadows. Just lower the contrast to a minimum on bright scenes with shadows, increase the contrast on foggy or cloudy days where there are few shadows and the light is more even-toned. The goal, as Anthony said, is a nice wide curved histogram with no peaks at either end. I hope this info is helpful,Art</blockquote>

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