Is it ever okay to have tones cut in a histogram?

Question

Steve Brazill · Answer

I've actually been watching this question to see if other people answered it because I'm not exactly sure what you're meaning is here. Is it ever okay to have tones cut in a histogram? So I'm going to go with what I think you mean and that is is it over okay to have your histogram clip on the right side or clip on the left side? Meaning you've clipped your highlights or you've clipped your blacks and the answer is yeah. It's your art, it's your story. It's your voice right at your artistic voice. And do whatever you want with it. If you want your blacks clip to clip your blacks, if you want your whites clip to clip your whites. Now, in my particular case, it may not be something I want or care about, I photograph live music. So with what I photograph, it has nothing to do with what I want. There will 100% be something in my scene that is clipped on both sides. A lighting director's job is to push or can be their job. Is to push the extremes of the human eye. The visual experience that the audience is going to see in doing that. When I take a photograph, those lights will clip Almost 100% of the time at the light fixture. The beam of light probably won't be, but the light itself is probably clipped as well. Depending on how it hits that artists. I might have their face perfectly exposed but the back of their head or their hair is completely We blown out. I can try and save that but their face then might be three stops underexposed and difficult to recover. So I am always going to have highlights blown out in the same thing. I might have a singer in the middle of a stage under a spotlight and to expose for them, the back of the stage is going to be 100% or behind them whichever angle I'm photographing at is going to be 100 black clipped a hundred percent black so assuming that that's what you meant and yeah, absolutely. And one thing I'll add really quick, I've only got 20 seconds. One thing I'll add really quick is a lot of times we would I photograph people are lit up with nothing but red if the red Channel clips and a face is completely gone of detail. Keep in mind that the blue and green Channel, probably are not clipped. So changing to black and white will bring a lot of those details back.

Moose Peterson · Answer

Well, so yeah. Is it ever? Okay to have tones cut in histograms? I'm here to tell you I never use histograms. I'd never look at histograms so do I have tones cut by histograms? I can honestly tell you I don't know. Odds are probably do because What does it matter? I've never had a client ask me to provide a histogram for a photograph. I've sent them or sold them. They look at the photograph and they look at the merits that they see within the borders that photograph. And from there, make the decision, okay? If it was done right or wrong and histogram has never been part of the question or part of the answer, if it was right or wrong.

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"Is it ever okay to have tones cut in a histogram?"