Is it possible to get the Histogram display in Lightroom to only consider the area selected by your cropping?

Question

I've noticed that when I crop a photo, the histogram does not change. If I am then making changes based on the histogram (ie. exposure, fill light, blacks, etc...), it would seem to me that the histogram would be more useful if it was based only the area I had selected in my crop.

For instance, if the histogram indicates that I have blown highlights, or vastly underexposed parts of my photo, but I have cropped to remove those areas, wouldn't the histogram be more useful if it represented that?

Maybe I'm wrong, if so, please let me know why!

Thanks - Sean

Answer

The histogram in Lightroom 3 does change. Here's an example:

Full frame

Cropped

You'll note that the cropped image has more image information in the top third of the histogram, whereas the uncropped one has more in the lower third. That's what you would expect. So the question is, why aren't you observing this? Are you using Lightroom 3?

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