[Tutorial] Lightroom Mobile Editing Tutorial Part 2 - Histogram & Light Panel

Now the first thing you need to do is enable the Histogram. It is a supper useful tool that will help you to understand the brightness of your photo correctly because when you are editing a photo, you are actually seeing the screen of your phone. If the brightness of your screen is more, you may not judge an underexposed image because your phone screen will tell you that it has been exposed correctly (as the brightness of the screen is more) . So what you see is not always right . Reading the Histogram is only the right way to judge the exposure of your photo.

What is Histogram?

Basically, Histogram is a graph which tells us wheatear a photo is overexposed or underexposed. It is really very easy to read. The y- axis of the Histogram represents the no. of pixels and the x- axis represents the brightness of the image. It starts from black and moves like shadows - mid tones - highlights and then whites .

For example, In a over-exposed photo there will be a lot of white and bright spots. So the number of pixels will be more at the extreme right side of the Histogram ( as the extreme right side represents the brightest part). It will show the spike towards the very right side of the graph. So you should decrease the exposure of that image.

Let me take another example..

In this image you can see the pixels are piled up at the very left side of the Histogram because it is a low key photo and there is a lot of black space in this image.

Note - An ideal histogram does not mean it should be spread equally over the x axis of the graph. Even there is no such thing as ideal histogram . It depends upon what types of images are you editing. In that low key photo increasing the exposure does not make any sense because the black part will be faded out. And I don't want to do this.

How to enable it?

Tap on the three dot icon on the top right corner of the screen and then enable the show histogram option.

You can also adjust individual part of the Histogram by using the besic lighting panel.

Lighting Panel-

Here you will get the exposure slider. Lightroom not just offers exposure slider but also offers highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks sliders to change the exposure of specific areas. Let's play with different sliders.

• Exposure - This slider allows us to change the exposure of the whole image. You can just move the slider by dragging it to left or right to  change the exposure.

• Contrast - It helps us to make our image more vivid. If you increase the contrast of an image, it will make the brighter parts more brighter and the darker parts more darker. You can adjust the contrast of different colours manually by using the tonal curve.

• Highlights - It helps to change the exposure of  the brightest part of the image without effecting the other part of the photo. Sometimes it may so happen that some parts of the image are perfectly exposed but other parts are over or under exposed. In this situation the highlights slider will help you.

• Shadows - It works like highlight in reverse way. This slider helps to add details in dark areas.

• Whites - It is not similar to Highlights. It does not effect all the brightest part of the image. If you drag the slider to the right, It will make ony the whiter areas more white.

• Blacks - It effects only the black portions of the image. You can make the black parts more black and or add details to the black parts of the image by moving the slider to the left and right, respectively

*tonal curve and color panel were also used.

I hope you got a basic idea about how to read the Histogram and change the exposure accordingly. I'll discuss about tonal curve in another article. Please stay tuned.

Note - To see the unedited original image of the edited photo, touch and hold on the image . The screen will automatically return back to the unedited image. 

I hope you read the first part of this article. If you missed here is the link to my previous thread. Kindly do visit and read it first -

https://community.hihonor.com/global/topicdetail/Tutorial-Lightroom-Mobile-Editing-Tutorial-Part-1-Cropping-amp/topicId-69063/

*Thank you*