Histograms and digital imaging…hearing those words puts most photographers to sleep, which is too bad. With a little attention and practice, any photographer can understand and use histograms to give us the best exposure possible for digital image files.

A histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of data, commonly used in the world of statistics. It is, according to Wikipedia, one of the basic tools of quality control.

In photography, it serves the same purpose, with the horizontal axis telling us how the tones of our images from solid black to solid white are distributed. The vertical axis tells us how many tones there are in the same image. The information in the histogram graphs the colors and tones in our photos whether that histogram is on the back of your camera, on your computer screen, or elsewhere in the world of digital imaging.