Scopes measure the photo you are looking at and plot the result. Use them to understand exposure, clipping, contrast, and color balance in a consistent way.
Aphera provides three scopes: Histogram, Waveform, and Color.
Where scopes appear
Scopes sit at the top of the Inspector, above Balance and Looks. In Develop mode they pin to the top of the editing column on the right, above Image Pipeline, and stay in place while the layers scroll beneath them.
Aphera remembers your selected scope and across launches.
Toggle the Inspector itself with Ctrl+I, or View > Show/Hide Inspector.
Choosing a scope
- Click a name to show that scope.
- Click the name of the scope already showing to collapse the scopes to the header row.
- Click the chevron to expand or collapse without changing the selection.
- Right-click the scope itself for a menu of the same three choices.
What scopes measure
Scopes read the whole photo with its current edits applied — every layer, plus crop and lens corrections. They update as you drag a slider, switch layers, or move to another photo.
- Pan and zoom do not move the readings. The scope measures the full frame, not the part on screen.
- The readings match in Grid, View, and Develop. Aphera analyzes at one fixed resolution in every mode.
Scopes measure the display signal, which runs from black at 0 to white at 1. Values beyond that range clip, and clipping shows in the plot as pixels piling up at the ends of the scale.
With no photo selected, the Inspector shows Select a photo in place of the scope.
Histogram
A count of how many pixels hold each brightness value, plotted separately for red, green, and blue. Dark values sit at the left, bright values at the right. Where the three channels overlap the curves blend.
Read it for:
- Exposure — the bulk of the distribution sitting left means a dark image, right means a bright one.
- Clipping — a spike against the left or right edge means pixels have hit black or white and hold no further detail.
- Color Cast — the three channels offset from each other rather than sitting on top of each other.
Bar heights scale against one fixed reference, not against the tallest bar in the current photo. A bar rises and falls only when its own pixel count changes, so compare a run of photos against each other.
Waveform
A brightness plot laid out against the width of the photo. Each column of the plot corresponds to the same column of the photo: the left edge of the waveform is the left edge of the frame. Within a column, height is brightness — the bottom of the plot is black, the top is white — and a point brightens where more pixels in that column share that value.
The plot takes the color of whichever channel dominates, so a column mixing all three evenly reads white and a column dominated by red reads red.
Read it for:
- Where the tones are — a bright sky reads as a band across the top of the columns it occupies, a shadowed foreground as a band along the bottom.
- Clipping by region — pixels flattened against the top or bottom of the plot, which the histogram reports without telling you where to look.
- Evenness — a horizon or a wall reads as a level band; a light falloff across the frame reads as a slope.
Color
Hue and saturation plotted with brightness removed. Every neutral gray lands at the exact center of the plot no matter how light or dark it is, so distance from the center is saturation and direction from the center is hue. Red sits at the top, with yellow to its upper left. A populated cell takes the average color of the pixels that landed there.
Read it for:
- Neutrality — a photo that should be neutral clusters at the center. A cluster pushed off center in one direction is a cast in that direction, and points to a white balance correction.
- Saturation — how far the plot expands toward the edges.
- Hue Spread — which hues the photo actually holds, and whether a grade has pulled them together or apart.