Digital Light & Color

If you are not already familiar with waveforms as an alternative to histograms (I wasn't), check out this video. Apparently, waveforms are commonly used in videography and not so much for still photography and I'm still not sure how useful this is for post-processing, but you can decide for yourselves.

https://www.dpreview.com/videos/6991658 ... histograms

I will be uploading a new release shortly that implements waveforms in the histogram tool so you can try it out.

Had just seen this same video, then thought that if I couldn't implement this in camera, it's probably not going to be very helpful.

So cool that you can add them to PWP so we can see how they work...

My guess is that they are only implemented for video cameras because video monitors are much larger than digital still camera screens or EVFs and there is not enough room to fit a waveform in with the image.

For use post exposure, since PWP lets you click on the input image to see where different parts of the image fall on the histogram, waveforms may not fill as pressing a need either. I still find waveforms a little hard to interpret although some of them are strangely beautiful.

"strangely beautiful", indeed. The Color Wheel and other test patterns produce interesting, but difficult to interpret results.

In the video they illustrate the waveform with a percentage scale. How is that implemented in PWP8? Is the top of the window = 100%?

Also, the cursor/markers don't seem active with waveforms, is that by design?

The scale runs from 0 to 100%.

Markers turned out not to work very well so they are turned off for now.

It's like a histogram turned on its side, reading bottom to top instead of left to right (for black to white...), with an actual representation of the left-to-right spatial distribution of the image... it's a little bit to wrap my head around.

But really mesmerizing to look at. I may have to try to take photos that will make interesting waveform patterns. Could there be a way to export the waveform images, other than a screen capture?

... like this: (negative + tile + watercolor)

So, would it be possible to see a waveform while editing an image? For instance, in the histogram mode of the Adjust transformation? Or to link the histogram tool to the Preview image?

It would be a lot of work but it is possible. At this point I'm debating whether or not it is worthwhile. You can update the waveform of the current output image by closing and then re-opening the histogram tool while you are using a transformation.

Actually, I took another look and found an easy way to make the histogram window update automatically every time the output image changes. So by keeping the Histogram tool open while using Adjust (or any other transformation) you can see the waveform change as you adjust the image.