For a Professional Food Photographer in LA, the histogram is an important indicator, perhaps the most important, but it is certainly not the Bible to read to believe as if it were an act of faith.
All this must make you do a short, but important, reasoning: the histogram is essential to have optimal photographs but its strength is linked to your ability to interpret. If you choose knowingly to place some shadow or light in your image, then consider the histogram as a guide to understand how far you can push (the limits of gamma).
If, instead, you do not have these needs and desires balanced photos and well done then pay attention to where it focuses most of the pixels and make sure that these are always more or less on the center of your histogram.
The histogram of the levels is the best known and the most common and is a re-presentation of what you can see in the room, with the difference that in the retouching program you can interact to modify it. You can fill in the gaps between shadows and highlights, move the ridges and force your hand a little to see what effect it does.
You have guessed all the settings and you have taken by a Professional Food Photographer in LA at least not ruined. This means being able to have absolute black and absolute white.
However, consider that in the perfect histogram each column must have a few pixels, even the extreme ones. This tells you the depth of the image and its completeness, the famous wide range we talked about a moment ago.
If you already start from a histogram so composed, even when you go to work in post-production your work is easier because you will have less (or no) pixels to recover because burned or empty, but you can work to intensify the depth and definition of your images, maybe working on contrasts or its levels.
If you have opened Photoshop at least once or any other professional photo-editing program that is not the free applications you find online or on the application store of your smartphone, you will have surely noticed that any modification, any retouching and any intervention, can not never disregard a histogram.
If you had just read the histogram, maybe you would have taken a new photograph by changing the parameters but remember that the machines are not always right. It is our photographic sensitivity that tells us when a photo is good or when it can be improved.
Take, for example, those beautiful backlit photos, the black silhouettes at sunset: do you know the histogram of those images as it appears?
