The function imhist is one of the older functions in the Image Processing Toolbox and we on the development team are aware that imhist has a variety of questionable design choices including but not limited to: Definition of histogram based on bin centers vs. bin edges. Use of number of left hand side arguments to infer whether user wants plotting vs. programatic histogram binning (e.g. histcounts). This results in the behavior noted above where two calls to imhist were required to plot and compute the histogram counts and the plotting can't use the count information. For these items, I would recommend in the near term using the modern histogram display and computation functions in MATLAB: histogram and histcounts. They can be used to address both of the behaviors above. The main value add at this point of imhist is its visualization of image gray levels in the context of a histogram, which is not something trivial to reproduce with histogram and histcounts today. That and I suppose indexed image support for people who work with indexed images. There is also the matter of default binning behavior as a function of input datatype, so a few things. I consider the two behaviors you noted in the misalignment of the colorbar with respect to the histogram bin center definition (and stem placement) and certainly the indexed image behavior colorbar behavior of displaying colors not present in the data in the colorbar to be a bug and will track them as such. I appreciate the detailed discussion here and in particular your histogram code as a means of communicating your desired behavior. I can't provide any short term fixes or workarounds for the moment with these issues but we do take your bug report seriously and intend to fix both the bugs and some of the UX choices described above in a future release of the product. Answer from Alex Taylor on mathworks.com