Abstract: The histogram-shifting method is a well-known method for reversible data hiding. To reach the goal of data hiding, this method shifts all pixel values between peak and zero points to leaves vacant spaces for data hiding. However, this method has no distortion-capacity control mechanism because the distortions are almost equally the same for large or small payload. In this study, we proposed a mechanism to control the image quality, for which small payload only needs to shift fewer pixels. Therefore, the proposed method produces better stego image quality and performs slightly efficient, especially for small payload. In comparison to the traditional histogram-shifting method, the proposed method significantly improves the stego image quality and computational cost without sacrificing the embedding capacity.