What Exposure Meters Tell You: Histogram, Waveform, Zebra, False Color (Camera Lesson 26)

Introduction

If all of the in-camera menus haven’t driven you crazy yet, chances are the in-camera meters have. In this video I’ll help you understand what the exposure meters are trying to tell you.

Histogram

The histogram is the most popular in-camera meter; you can find it on both low-end and high-end cameras. It displays the distribution of the luminance values of the shot the camera is recording. On the x-axis black is represented on the left hand side and white is on the right. Different values of gray are in-between. On the y-axis is frequency, or the amount of pixels. The bottom represents few pixels and the top represents a lot of pixels. So a dark image will show a graph that is stacked high and to the left, and a light image will be high and stacked to the right. While an average image will create a mountain in the center of the graph.

The histogram is where we get the terms Expose to the Right (ETTR) and Expose to the left (ETTL). ETTR means making it so that the exposure is biased to the right, and ETTL is exposure biased towards the left. You may have also seen…

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