I recently got my boat and a new fish finder elite 4 hdi but I don't even know how to read the darn thing
any help would be appreciated!

Little white dots are sometimes fish. Large group of little white dots clustered together is structure. When you are out at Benbrook find a tree that sits just below the water and use trolling motor to go over it. Look at the fishfinder screen. Don't get too excited about all those little white dots being fish or not. More important to know depth, see structure and fish it. If big screen graphs and little white dot interpretation were as good as advertisers claim then experienced anglers would never come back without a limit or never get skunked.

Spend time on the water and you'll soon be able to give me a few pointers on what you see on the graph.

Spend time on some of the forums reading and looking at screen shots. Also get the online manual to your unit and become familiar with its capabilities. BBC has many forums for this purpose.

BBC Lowrance Image Interpretation

I got no idea ...but I would drop a jig just to make sure
my interpretations of screen images is like palm reading

I am not familiar with that depth finder, but that looks like "Down Imaging" images to me. Someone else chime in here.

Looks like some structure with bait fish to the left and fish all around it to me. Drop a jig!

The white dots look like what should be fish. Did you fish it? Catch anything? Even if you didn't, they may have been fish, but weren't biting.

Needs some adjusting to get a better picture. Those little units will do better than that.

This

Travel a little faster while graphing to get an even better pic. About 3.5 is where my down image looks the best. How many kHz is your DI set on?

sonar is all about contrast, you need to work with the unit to create contrast. Making one thing (fish) stand out against something else. Work with the different colors on the unit, and sensitivity, ping speed, ect. It is good to get profiencent with the 2d function of a graph, before you try to interpret what the down image is showing you. get you a lil fishie by creme lures the shad pearl color with red or black spot, the smallest one, and keep it tied one a rod. This is a good lure to catch almost any species. It can help you ID what id down there. Remember white bass are bottom dwellers, they LIVE on the bottom and leave the bottom to feed. They usually hang near, humps. depressions, dropoffs, in areas with little or no structure. So when u find fish near structure, in a good depth for the time of year, its a good chance its crappie. If your sonar has fish Id on the 2 D screen, you can use the fish ID symbols to eliminate smaller fish like perch or gizzard shad from Id ing on the screen. many people were lead to believe that using fish ID symbols were for rookies, and a gimmick.. NOT TRUE. I can usually tell the difference in crappie, white bass, and black bass with the fish ID. Other factors come into play to make the call, so the ID is just one part of the equasion. Setting the Fish ID sensitivity on 5 on a humminbird, will usually eliminate everything up to a crappie, you wont see baitfish or perch. so if you see a small fish Id Its usually a small crappie, a medium can be a larger crappie or small white bass, and a large tends to be a largemouth, large white, hybrid. The sonar picks up the size of the airbladder, bloodline, and bony structure, but mostly the air bladder. Different fish have different size air bladder,s . Usually the size of the fish corresponds with the size of the bladder, but not always, some bigger fish have smaller air bladders. You must spend time working with your unit. People call me asking what setting to set thier unit at. There are some basic settings to start with, and some stay put, but many times the setting will need to be changed to get optimum performance out of a unit. Dont be afraid to try different things.

but to answer you question I would think that on the left is a school of small crappie, on the right is a large boulder with shad all around it and to the right of it. If you settings were crisper it would make the whites on the boulder pop more .you see the hard lines, and slightly brighter whites on the angles, thats what makes me think its a boulder. The shad on it kind of break up the lines, but I still see them.

i have the same one!....I never used one before so it took a long while before I started to understand it but the more I read and the more i got on the water the easier it was.

i edited this photo so you can get a better look. this is a tree obviously but what you don't want to do is start looking for fish cause they are down there....you cant tell by the graph.....some of the settings i use on mine is 800khz for downscan because of the better resolution and i use a ping of normal cause if you use fast it tends to make everything look like horizontal lines

everything on your graph is fish and shad anytime i see something like that i throw a line just to see whats down there but you should take off the night view on the top screen and use bottom track with white or just the white background everything els i set to auto like the sensitivity and the depth