Is histogram used when taking flash photography?

joe f

New member
When you are going to use your flash does the histogram offer any help? I can see how it does in non flash photography situations but it's not clear to me its effectiveness with flash. Sorry, novice digital photographer
 
A histogram may be useful for reviewing an image taken with flash, but it would be no use before an exposure where flash will be used.

A histogram is just a guide to the tonal spread, like your cameras meter it is only a reading and doesn't necessarily know that a dark or bright subject is supposed to be rendered black or white, so slavishly following a histogram isn't always entirely helpful or useful.

Unless your LCD brightness is waaaay out it should be apparent from the image review if an image is badly burned out or badly underexposed.

If in doubt use bracketing and shoot RAW, this gives you a choice of exposures around what the camera deems to be correct, and if your chosen shot is out you can usually attempt a decent recovery via RAW conversion. This is more time consuming for now, but it will help you learn how your camera will see certain situations. If you shoot RAW & JPEG then you can chuck away the RAWs for the good iamges and just use the RAWs to salvage ones you aren't happy with.
 
Histograms are very difficult to use under any conditions.

It is much more useful when you are processing images using a program like Photoshop or Lightroom

To see how crazy a histogram can get, shoot one high key and one low key photo and see if you can get any really good information you can use during your shoot. Probably not.

If the image looks good on your LCD (with it set to zero gain), the image file will 999 times out of 1000 shots will be perfectly fine.
 
Histograms are very difficult to use under any conditions.

It is much more useful when you are processing images using a program like Photoshop or Lightroom

To see how crazy a histogram can get, shoot one high key and one low key photo and see if you can get any really good information you can use during your shoot. Probably not.

If the image looks good on your LCD (with it set to zero gain), the image file will 999 times out of 1000 shots will be perfectly fine.
 
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