View The Histogram Of Any Image In Your Browser With A Simple User-Friendly Plugin

If you’re a geek like me, you love to reverse-engineer images you come across, view EXIF data, or otherwise pull as much info out of an image you like as possible. A recently released browser extension allows you to view the histogram of any image on the web, and boy oh boy do I love it.

Image Histogram is an extension for Google Chrome which allows you to simply right-click an image and view the histogram data. Some of you may be wondering ‘what the heck good is a histogram and only a histogram?’ I find that I often find histograms useful for comparison between my work and other photographer’s work, noting how far highlights and shadows are pushed in high-key and low-key images, and for seeing how compression has been applied to my images across various upload interfaces (everyone knows how notorious Facebook is for degrading image quality, and now we get to see just how bad it really is!).

The addon, which is available for Chrome, can be found here, and although I haven’t tested it, there is a similar plugin available for Firefox, which can be found here. I haven’t run into any issues or crashes from using this plugin, but let us know if you run into any issues in the comments. There are a handful of sites in which some images are unable to be analyzed due to privacy, though it seems hit or miss – on Facebook, for example, I was able to analyze some but not others, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it, though most sites work flawlessly.

[via reddit]