We've talked about using the live view and the histogram functionality to visually gauge your exposure. And that is an amazing tool is one of the tools that I'm using a ton. I'm going to give you guys two more tips and another tool to use to help you gauge your exposures. But with a water backlit, we have a beautiful kind of backlit water, look, we have a nice depth and everything but we have strong highlights. And because of that, it's going to be impossible really to gauge whether these highlights are blown looking at just a preview. And even when we look at just the image histogram itself, it's still gonna be difficult because that histogram we might just be pushing a little bit towards the edge and we're not gonna be able to see exactly what is blown out.
So I have two tips for you. Now one is going to be to adjust the LCD brightness and we're going to talk about why and how in just a second. And tip number two is to always always always use the in camera highlight alert, because it's simply too difficult to know exactly what's blown. What the highlight alert is going to do is it's going to blink the areas that are blown out in black so you can see exactly what is going on in the image. Now for the Nikon we can access the monitor brightness by going through down into the setup menu and we have monitor brightness. Now what I recommend that you do is you turn it all the way up.
Generally these cameras are going to come set at a default setting of say zero, or they're going to come set at an auto setting and auto is probably the worst of anything. But even at a default setting of zero The problem is that when I walk outside to a bright scene like this, I really can't see my LCD. So my recommendation is leave the monitor brightness on the brightest setting or choose a brightness that works for you, but don't leave it on auto. Now let's go ahead and go back I want to turn on my highlight alert, or at least verify that it's turned on. So on my Nikon, I need to go back to the playback menu. Now in the playback menu, we have playback display options.
If I click into this menu, we have several different options. And you can see one of them is that RGB histogram. So we had the option to enable the RGB histogram in addition to that standard luminosity or the standard gray histogram as well, but I have right now the highlights turned on I want to make sure that that highlight alert is turned on this is the alert so if it's off, let's go ahead and click over that's off. We're going to right click again to turn it on. And if you don't want any of these other things, options available, you can always turn off the different display options that don't really apply to you. But I would recommend the highlight alert and the RGB histogram is also awesome.
And shooting data is absolutely awesome. And the overview is awesome for me too. So I kind of like all of them. So now what I'm gonna do is adjust my camera settings, we're going to take a quick shot just for a test. Okay, let's just go ahead and grab an image. Okay, so I'm going to hit play so that we get that preview and I'm going to hit up on my D pad just so we can get it back to the standard view, and then you'll see that it's going to start blinking.
Now this is what I never would have been able to detect just by the standard histogram and the standard histogram, it would have looked like I captured most of my tonal range, but when I look at the highlight alert, it tells me that a little bit of the kind of peaks and highlights in the water are blown out. And from that I can make adjustments and fine tune my settings. So what I know now is I'm going to go ahead and adjust my setting down to probably one 800 of a second or maybe one 600 Let's go on 640 Let's take another shot. We have a tiny bit blown, but it's looking much better. I'm going to go up one more step to one 800. Let's go ahead and take another shot.
And there we go, that looks awesome. We basically retained all of our detail, I'm going to go ahead and hit. Let's see, hit play. And let's look at the histogram as well use both these tools in conjunction, you can see that with the histogram, I pushed my shadows to the left edge, we don't have any shadows clip, I have my highlights all the way against the right edge and I made sure that that little tip of highlights isn't blown out in the water. Okay, so again, I'm zoomed into these rocks for that close up of the water washing into the rocks. I'm going to wait for that perfect wave and capture my shot.
My assignment for you all is to go out and use the highlight alert in conjunction with your histogram. Remember, for your specific camera making model Be sure to check out your manual if you don't know how to access or turn on the highlight alert. That's it for this video. I'm going to get my shot and I'll see you all in the next one.