Example 3: Tiger Histogram

In this image, the camera's auto-exposure software attempted to expose for the brightly lit portion of the log. In doing so, it underexposed the tiger. The red arrow indicates the bright pixels in the histogram.

To improve the highlight, I click and drag the right edge of the curve until I see just an edge of pure white in the brighter areas of the tiger.

I'm actually overdoing it a bit here. Normally I would want just the slightest hint of white pixels, and not a solid area as shown here.

In addition to the poor highlight, the darker parts of this image are too gray. I fix this problem by dragging the left edge of the graph toward the middle, until I see black starting to show up in the darker areas - in this case the stripes.

After highlight and shadow, the contrast is better. Not bad at all.

The image is still a bit on the dark side, so I add a midpoint to the curve and lighten things up.

This particular curve shape adds contrast to the shadows, with the tradeoff being that the brighter parts of the image lose contrast.