Trust the Force Histogram Luke Jeff!

You’d think I’d have enough experience using a fancy-schmancy digital SLR camera, I’d have learned by now to trust something besides the digital display on the back to determine if I got the exposure correct for the shot or not. I mean really, can I really trust a 3″ LCD to give me all the information I need to determine if I got white whites and black blacks and a nice distribution in between? No. I know I can’t. It’s not perfectly true to colors, and sure can’t be trusted to give me a fail-proof representation of exposure. Sure, the D300 has a nice bright LCD, but can I take a photo and review it and expect the LCD to look the same inside or outside? No, I can’t. Do I know this? Yes, I do. Do I keep getting suckered in? Yep. You betcha. Without a doubt, and to the point I’m starting to worry about my sanity. You know the old saying right? Insanity is doing the same thing over and yadda, yadda, yadda…

Case in point? Here ’tis.

I was shooting Jacqui in a low-light elevator lobby in the Mid-Continent Tower in Tulsa. I was using a single SB-800 propped on a trashcan below and to the right of camera axis. I had a full cut of CTO on to balance with the tungsten lighting and was using a Honl Photo 1/4″ honeycomb grid to get a nice tight light on Jacqui without spilling around and behind her. I was using a Lensbaby 3G, which has nothing to do with this topic, but it’s sure cool to point out.

So I take a shot or two and tweak the flash output using the on-camera Commander mode. How am I checking the exposure and lighting? With the LCD of course. I mean, that is the entire point of this post, eh?

So a couple of shots and I’m rocking it. Now I’m just trying to get a good set with the Lensbaby to get her eyes nice and sharp while throwing in that awesome Lensbaby blur away to the edges. About five shots and I’ve got it all. Light, focus, blur, all nailed. Money shot. Looks great, show Jacqui and she digs it, or is just being really polite. Either way, I’ve got it and I’ll be happy if I don’t get another good shot all day. It’s that good. Here’s a low-tech screen shot just for proof.

Well, I thought it was that good until I got it home and dumped it into Bridge. I’ve found Bridge can be a real ego compensator compared to the LCD. The LCD says “you rock” and then Bridge says “Serious? You’re really serious?” Here’s the proof.

Wait a minute. It looked good on the back display when I shot it. Wait another minute. Haven’t I been here before? Yep. About every time I’m shooting in low light. Here’s what the histogram on this one looked like.

So if I’d been paying attention to, and believing in the histogram on the camera? Pretty much the same thing.

The D300 has a 12-stop spread from black to white, and here I’ve managed to compress all my pixels in the bottom third of that dynamic range. Not what I was after at all, and sure not what the display really looked like.

So I don’t want to lose the image all together and I jump in to that all too familiar “save it in post” mode. Tweak here, tweak there, thank God for Adobe Camera Raw. Here are the develop settings that got me there and the resulting histogram. If you’re familiar with these settings, you can see how far I had to push.

‘Course you go pushing exposure to +2.25 and brightness to +50 and here come ‘da noise. Funny how trying to correct one mistake leads to others. When will I learn? When, when, when? Trust your histogram.

So a run through Imagenomic Noiseware Pro and I’ve got something presentable.

It also occurs to me maybe, just maybe, I’ve got the display brightness up too high on the camera. I checked, and it’s set to the default of 0, but just to help me out next time I get dense and forget the histogram, I adjusted it to be a little more realistic. If it’s not bright enough for outside, I’ll adjust it back when needed, in fact I even saved the LCD Brightness menu to the customized menu.

So now, with the LCD brightness set to -2, this is what I’m seeing.

So, lets see if I can do better in the future. I mean Skywalker trusts the Force and destroys a whole Death Star, surely I can trust a histogram and score an image or two.