Histogram

In Photoshop, we have the panel “Histogram”. When you do color corrections, you will have a histogram that you should understand. So a word of explanation.

To open the panel, click “Window” in the menu bar and select “Histogram” in the drop-down menu.

A histogram can help you determine whether or not an image contains enough detail to make a correction.

We can change the display of “Histogram” panel.
Just click the downward pointing arrow in the title bar of the pane (1), and from the drop-down menu choose one of the following options:

1. Compact representation:
   Displays a histogram without statistics. The histogram contains data on the entire image.
2. Expanded View:
   Displays the histogram with statistics.
3. All channels:
   This will display separate histograms for each of the channels.

If you wish different channels in color display, you select this option.
If you wish to hide the statistics (3), click the option “Show Statistics”.

If you want the histogram to contain the data of the entire image, that is to have color view in the upper histogram, click the downward pointing arrow next to the box “Channel” (2), and select “Colors” in the drop-down menu .

As an example, I have enlarged the diagram (1). Here we see the shadows, or rather the dark colors in the photo on the right, the midtones in the middle, and the highlights (bright colors) on the left.

Far left is black and has an RGB value 0, and the far right is white and has an RGB value of 255.

Advanced explanation of this is, a black pixel (2) has Red 0, Green 0, Blue 0

And a white pixel (3) has Red 255, green 255, blue 255.

With the chart, now you see that there are no black (4) and white pixels (5) in this photo.

While you make color adjustments to the picture, the diagram in “Histogram” panels adjusts automatically.
If you go too far with the change, a yellow warning icon is displayed in the upper right corner of the diagram.

As you can see in the picture below, when I increased the brightness, midrange is brought more to the right, so more whiter, the shadows are eliminated, and the highlights are reinforced.

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