How to use Histogram in Lightroom (Classic or CC)

How to use histogram in Lightroom, is a skill that really helps your post production.  The histogram in Lightroom is an extremely useful tool that is easily overlooked; hopefully this article will help you realise that, and start to make more use of it.

 Its main purpose is to help you understand the relationship between the image and the tones in your photos. It helps you to get your exposure levels spot on.

how to use histogram in lightroom

Where is the Lightroom histogram?

The histogram is found in the same place, both in the Library and Develop modules.

In the Library module, it helps you see what is happening to your image when you make adjustments in the Quick Develop panel. You also need it in the Develop module as a visual guide for the adjustments made during post-shoot processing.

What Information does the Lightroom Histogram Provide?

The histogram shows you whether you have any clipped highlights or shadows. It also tells you how much contrast the photo has. This information lets you decide whether you need to adjust exposure and contrast. It also tells you whether the original photo was over or underexposed. The histogram changes as you move sliders around in the Basic panel, so you can immediately see the effect.

how to use histogram in lightroom

It is worth noting that although there is a quick develop module the serious editing is done in the develop module.

How to Check your Images for Clipping

In order to see if your image contains shadow or highlight clipping you need to click on the triangular icons in the top left and right of the histogram panel. (You can use the keyboard shortcut key J to show and hide clipping.)

Understanding the Histogram in Lightroom

Spotting Histogram Clipping

Let us take a look at this screenshot from Lightroom. The first thing to note is that the two small boxes containing the clipping triangles both have a white border which shows that they are active.

If you look at the image itself, there are large areas of blue and some areas coloured red. The blue shows where the shadows are being clipped, (or contain no detail) and the red areas indicate where the highlights are clipped, (contain no detail.)

how to use histogram in lightroom

As you change the settings these areas will reduce or even disappear.

This next image, a Juvenile Kingfisher, is slightly underexposed. The background shadow detail is heavily clipped whereas there are very few clipped highlights. The overall histogram also confirms that the image is under-exposed.

Kingfisher Histogram

If we look at the image below, I have applied auto-exposure, (something I rarely do to my images), we can see that several things have happened: –

  1. the histogram has moved to the right
  2. there are more clipped highlights
  3. there are slightly clipped shadow areas (especially on the face of the bird)
  4. some of the sliders have moved as the software attempts to show us its version of a perfectly exposed image

Needless to say this isn’t what I was looking for with this image.

Kingfisher Histogram

This is what I was actually after.

Juvenile Kingfisher on mossy branch

NOTE: If either of the clipping triangles remain grey, it means there is no clipping in the image.

This is a sign of a well exposed image. Like the majority of photographers I expose my images to preserve highlight detail.

The Clipping icons also come in useful to indicate if you are losing detail in the highlights or shadows as a result of making adjustments in the Basic panel.

The Histogram and Contrast

If the histogram is bunched together and doesn’t cover the entire range of the graph this indicates that the photo has low contrast. This is most likely to happen when shooting in flat light.

 Histogram in Lightroom

 

The histogram and the Tone sliders

There are five zones in the Lightroom histogram. Moving from left to right, they are: –

  1. blacks
  2. shadows
  3. exposure
  4. highlights
  5. whites

 

how to use histogram in lightroom

Each area on the histogram directly relates to its corresponding slider. When you move the mouse through the histogram (Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites or Blacks.) The corresponding slider in the Basic panel the zone that is affected highlights in white. I’ve added orange boxes to make it clear where each zone is.

Understanding the Histogram in Lightroom

Manipulating the Histogram

When you hover your mouse over the histogram you will get feedback as to which area will be affected in several ways: –

  1. the description appears bottom right of the histogram panel
  2. the background of the affected turns a light grey
  3. the corresponding slider highlights itself

This short video shows the relationship between the histogram and the sliders.

Understanding the Histogram in Lightroom - short video showing histogram and slider relationship

Adjusting your Image

If you notice on the video, when you hover the mouse over the histogram panel the mouse pointer changes to a double-headed arrow.

To adjust any of the areas in the histogram simply click and hold down the mouse, (left click on PC), and drag it either left or right to adjust a particular area. As well as the histogram and the sliders changing you should see the image change in response to your mouse input.

Each slider controls a particular zone, but bear in mind that those adjustments also make changes in the other zones.

If this sounds complicated you might benefit from coming along to my Learn to Edit in Lightroom workshop.

Luminance and Colour

If you are working on a color image you will notice the histogram contains several colours. What Lightroom is actually showing you is four histograms in one.

The grey represents the luminance histogram; this shows brightness values only and has nothing to do with color. The other three histograms show RGB (red, green and blue) and correspond to the color channels in the image.

Where the RGB overlap you get other colours such as Cyan.

Saturation

Saturation is one of the 5 sliders which make up the Presence group in the Basic panel.

The image below shows how moving the saturation slider from ‘0’ to ‘-100’ removes any colour information from the image. As you can see, the histogram changes at the same time.

Understanding the Histogram in Lightroom

Increasing Saturation means that the colors are more vibrant. The result in this image, is that the peaks of the color histograms have a more even spread.

Obviously this is an extreme example because you should never need to increase image saturation to +100 or -100. But there may be times when you make adjustments that clip colors rather than brightness values. It depends on your output. It will make a difference if images are produced for screen or print.

So what have we Learnt about Understanding the Histogram in Lightroom

Well that concludes my brief introduction to understanding the histogram in Lightroom. Obviously there is far more to the software than I have covered in this article, and I go through it in my workshop, Learn to Edit with Lightroom. The workshop can run face to face or remotely in this covid dominated period.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. Hopefully, you can see what a useful tool Lightroom is is for processing your images.

If you are interested in learning about the histogram in your camera the look no further than this article on the Camera Histogram.

If you have any questions about the content, please let me know in the comments below.

 

Editing with Lightroom