Histogram

Three images: low dynamic range, average contrast, high dynamic range - shooting one averagely exposed, and then one that is one stop under and another that is one stop darker for each.  Compare the histograms.  Look at highlight and shadow clipping.

Low dynamic range

Low dynamic range - average exposure; scene is quite flat - indicated by the middle pyramid shape - no highlight or shadow clipping but lacks impact/wow factor (apart from the subject matter!).

Low dynamic range - one stop over exposed; scene is lighter, histogram taller and thinner and more to the right, colours less saturated and loss of texture.  Almost milky in appearance.






Low dynamic range - one stop under exposed; scene is darker, histogram taller but jagged on left (dark side) - colours more saturated and texture more apparent, but picture also clearly too dark.

For my final version, I first of all cropped to square to improve the composition and exclude the boring background (also to make the faces bigger), I retained the average exposure as this had the best balance of light vs dark, but increased contrast and texture to make the scene more dramatic and make the leopards stand out more against the background.  Also converted to mono to bring out the pattern of the leopards and helps overcome the low dynamic range.

The resultant histogram was more dome-shaped than the average spike (more resembling average contrast), with greater dark towards the left - but still no clipping.






High Dynamic Range

High dynamic range - average exposure; spiky historgram to the right showing the amount of dark in the background (although no shadow clipping) and there is a small spike to the right of the histogram showing some highlight clipping (which you can see in the edge lighting of the meerkat).

High dynamic range - one stop overexposed; histogram has moved towards the middle for the darker tones, but there is significantly more highlight clipping showing on the right-side of the histogram, which is also evident from the image itself.

High dynamic range - one stop underexposed; histogram further to the left for the dark tones, but there is no highlight clipping to the left and still no shadow clipping to the right, which suggests this is the right exposure.  To test this, I tried changing the exposure to see the exact point that the highlight disappears, and it is at one stop under exposed.

For my final version, I converted to mono and sharpened slightly (taking care not to create halos).  No other processing was required.














Average contrast

Average contrast - average exposure; histogram is dome-shaped with a fairly even distribution (slightly more dark); scene is fairly flat though

Average contrast - one stop over exposed; histogram has moved to the right as you'd expect, but there is now a more even distribution of tones.  But a tiny bit of highlight clipping has been introduced although this is not noticeable in the image.

Average contrast - one stop under exposed; histogram has moved to the left and is now a bit jagged with a top spike - indicating very dark patches, although no shadow clipping.  Image is clearly too dark.

For my final version, I used the average exposure (knowing that I would increase contrast), cropped to square to exclude the background and increase focus on the animal increased contrast and sharpened, and converted to mono to bring out the leopard pattern.

The histogram for this version doesn't look great...it's showing shadow clipping, but I think for the mono version with this kind of background, that's ok.  I double checked by also trying the one-stop over version, however I found that that one created halo (because of the small highlight clipping) when I sharpened it, so overall, the average one is the best option.