This work analyzes water-in-oil emulsion formation in a Taylor-Couette shear cell. ASTM certified brine is the dispersed phase. and an assortment of crude and model oils are used as continuous phases. This work employs the pulsed field gradient with diffusion editing (PFG-DE) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique to measure the drop size distributions. The PFG-DE technique is particularly useful because it is not constrained by the optical properties of the emulsions, investigates the entire emulsion, and does not assume a form of the drop size distribution. The effect of the imposed shear field on the drop size distributions is studied (a) experimentally by subjecting the emulsions to a wide range of shear fields in the Taylor-Couette cell and (b) computationally via numerical simulations in Fluent. Such quantitative information on the mechanisms of formation of water-in-crude-oil emulsions is invaluable because conventional optical measurement techniques encounter difficulties when attempting to characterize water-in-crude-oil emulsions.