In the last three posts I’ve dealt with photographic subjects that have some degree of specularity. It occurs to me that some readers may not understand the concept well, and if they do understand it, they may not be able to relate the concept to their photography. Hence this post. In general English, specularity is… [Read More]

Here’s the scene, photographed with a Hasselblad X2D, 90mm XCD lens, and developed in Lightroom with default settings. Here’s the raw histogram, log-log presentation: Looks like it’s ETTR, but maybe too conservative. Here’s the raw histogram with a linear y-axis: That makes it look a stop or so underexposed from ETTR. Here’s the in-camera histogram:… [Read More]

In the previous post, I looked at in-camera, raw, and developed histograms for a normal-contrast scene. We saw that deciding on the correct exposure required consideration of how much specular and near-specular highlights should be protected. For this post, I wanted a low-contrast scene. I got one, but there’s a specular highlight that I didn’t… [Read More]

In the previous post I looked at lots of ways to display histograms. In this one, I’m going to take a scene with normal outdoor contrast, and look at the relevant histograms. Here’s the scene, as captured by a Hasselblad X2D with a 90 mm XCD lens, at close to ETTR (more on that later),… [Read More]

Around the turn of the 20th century, Karl Pearson, an English mathematician and statistician, invented the histogram as a way of presenting data. Originally, the histogram was a kind of bar chart, with the x-axis divided into intervals — now called buckets or bins — and a bar for each bin indicating how many items… [Read More]