Import histogram

I have included a screenshot of the picture I working on and model, which is taken by Gursky. As you can see my picture's histogram is a lot more chaotic, particularly on the brighter side which I am trying to resolve.

 

In my opinion, part of the mystery emanating from Gursky's pictures --- this one and others --- can be found in the regularity and simplicity of the histogram distribution. 

By @Daniel Roy

There may be some misinterpretation of the histogram going on here. When you describe the peaks to the extreme right and how you want to move them to the left, that is a fair goal…even without seeing the image, an experienced image editor would say that a pile-up of histogram bars at the right edge of the graph indicate blown highlights (clipping): The lightest values contain no detail. This is not good, because areas without detail are just blank. However, here the histogram stops being helpful because it can’t tell you which pixels are blown out. You have to use the clipping display to see that.

Moving the histogram data to the left is fine, except for one thing: If it is not a raw image, blown highlights may be unrecoverable that way (a solid white area has no detail to recover). If so, the optimal way to recover them is to go back to the raw image and reprocess it (or back to the original film and re-scan it) so that no highlights are blown. I am confident that Gursky takes care in his original processing to make sure highlights are protected at all steps from capture to print, like Ansel Adams would.

Proper processing from capture to print would also achieve your other stated goal, smoothing out the histogram. A spiky histogram can suggest missing levels, overcompression, and other unwanted artifacts of sub-optimal processing. The smoother histogram in the Gursky images suggests that care was taken at all processing stages to maintain realistic tonal transitions.

If the original image is raw, the tools in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom are built to help you preserve all the original raw tones you need, and redistribute them in any way that you need, so that you don’t have to do much more in Photoshop. In the demo below you see these steps:

1. Enable the Shadow Clipping Warning (blue) and Highlight Clipping Warning (red).

2. (optional) Enable Before/After view.

3. Adjust each of the tone controls, pulling back any time clipping warnings appear..

Notice how each option redistributes the tones:

• Exposure moves everything, but mostly the middle. 
• Contrast moves the extremes in or out. 
• Highlights moves mostly the lighter tones. 
• Shadows moves mostly the darker tones. 
• Whites changes the level at which the lightest tones are clipped. 
• Blacks changes the level at which the darkest tones are clipped. 

Also notice that about halfway through, I stop dragging the sliders and I start directly dragging ranges in the histogram graph, in case you find dragging the histogram itself to be a more intuitive way to redistribute the tones.

Note: If shadows or highlights are totally clipped in the raw data, then they are totally unrecoverable and the mistake was under- or over-exposure in the camera.

I believe the differences you see in the two images are partly because the photo of the Gursky image contains less clipping in fewer channels, and has smoother and more subtle tonal distribution. I also believe that the original Gursky print is likely to have much less clipping than this JPEG-compressed reproduction, or maybe no clipping at all except for specular highlights.