Getting Nerdy With The Histogram

Die-hard Photoshop users will get a kick out of this. David at IronicSans.com wanted to make an image that looked the same in the histogram view. For the laymen in the crowd, a histogram is a bar graph representing all of the tones in an image. Most pro-sumer digital SLR’s come with a histogram view so photographers can check for clipping of colors. In Photoshop you can see the histogram of your image by going to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. He didn’t get a very interesting image from that as you might imagine.

Then he got the idea to try and create an image in the histogram view. After some tedious tweaking by hand he came up with this rather dull image.

Histogram Image - Before

But if you look at the histogram then you will see this.

Histogram Image - After

The explanation of how it was done boggles my mind, although at the heart of it, it is just math. This reminds me of the Aphex Twin song that when viewed on a spectrograph (a way of visualizing sound) you saw a creepy face.

2 Responses to “ Getting Nerdy With The Histogram ”

  1. Ah this is kinda neat. I wonder if people will start up a new form of photo-shopped art heh I guess this isn’t too far off from fractals in the technical sense.

    Artistic means aside, you think they could come up with an ISO standard for LCDs/Monitors so the histogram wouldn’t be so needed… Damn Canon LCDs on the cameras lie so bad!

    Reply

  2. and for the real lamen out there, the word is “laymen”

    Reply

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