That makes sense, but personally I don't pay any attention to that. I adjust my highlights and shadows to whatever looks good to me, I don't follow guidelines or anything like that. I don't care about the histogram, I care about how the picture looks. I've found that matching the shadows and highlights like how you were talking about makes the image look flat, at least to my eyes and the editing style. At the end of the day it's all personal preference.
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Lightroom: Positive Highlights - Does anybody use them?
- Thread starter paul_b
- Start date
That makes sense, but personally I don't pay any attention to that. I adjust my highlights and shadows to whatever looks good to me, I don't follow guidelines or anything like that. I don't care about the histogram, I care about how the picture looks. I've found that matching the shadows and highlights like how you were talking about makes the image look flat, at least to my eyes and the editing style. At the end of the day it's all personal preference.
That also makes sense to me. So many things that sound right seem to contradict each other!That makes sense, but personally I don't pay any attention to that. I adjust my highlights and shadows to whatever looks good to me, I don't follow guidelines or anything like that. I don't care about the histogram, I care about how the picture looks. I've found that matching the shadows and highlights like how you were talking about makes the image look flat, at least to my eyes and the editing style. At the end of the day it's all personal preference.
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RocketCowboy
Senior Member
After asking a similar question about positive highlights on the Adobe forum I was advised by most that the best practice is to match the value that you give to shadows with that of highlights, but shadows being positive and highlights being negative, ie +30 shadows with -30 highlights etc. Apparently using both together increases mid-tone contrast. Also, I suspect adjusting shadows and highlights always effects just the tones mapped in the areas of the unadjusted image (before any post processing (inc exposure work)) and can therefore hit the wrong pixels that you want to target if your image is under or over exposed. Therefore using shadows and highlights balanced together keeps the original histogram balanced, ie not distorted in unintended areas. I of course could be wrong.
That seems to be the behavior I've seen when having LR auto-suggest values for shadows and/or highlights. If it goes +30 on shadows, without fail it seems to go -30 on highlights, so that makes sense to me.
I've never used the Auto-suggest feature, and so that's very interesting.That seems to be the behavior I've seen when having LR auto-suggest values for shadows and/or highlights. If it goes +30 on shadows, without fail it seems to go -30 on highlights, so that makes sense to me.
It seems like a never ending learning curve, lol
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I found this on the web and thought it would be interesting to copy and paste it here:
From what I recall in LR 4 when PV2012 was first introduced the Auto Tone button would produce unequal values for Highlights and Shadows. I believe this was changed sometime in LR5 so that the Auto Tone button now always produces equal and opposite values (-Highlights = +Shadows). Also I don't think I've ever seen Auto Tone produce +Highlights = -Shadows since Adobe made this change. So why does it work?
The PV2012 Tone controls work on specific tonal regions with some overlap and interaction, but still very much focused on their defined Histogram areas. You can see these areas by running the mouse pointer over the Develop module histogram. The Highlights and Shadows controls can be thought as controls that work on opposite ends of a Tone Curve, but use a much more complex algorithm. If the settings are not kept "equal and opposite" the image data levels will be shifted to the left or right in the histogram causing a much stronger interaction with all of the other control areas. This will require much more Tone control "tweaking" when attempting to produce a properly adjusted image.
Exposure: Midtone Brightness (30%-70% Levels)
Contrast: Midtone Contrast (30%-70% Levels)
Highlights: Highlight Area (70%-90% Levels)
Shadows: Shadow Area (10%-30% Levels)
Whites: White Point Area (90%-100% Levels)
Blacks: Black Point Area (0%-10% Levels)
From what I recall in LR 4 when PV2012 was first introduced the Auto Tone button would produce unequal values for Highlights and Shadows. I believe this was changed sometime in LR5 so that the Auto Tone button now always produces equal and opposite values (-Highlights = +Shadows). Also I don't think I've ever seen Auto Tone produce +Highlights = -Shadows since Adobe made this change. So why does it work?
The PV2012 Tone controls work on specific tonal regions with some overlap and interaction, but still very much focused on their defined Histogram areas. You can see these areas by running the mouse pointer over the Develop module histogram. The Highlights and Shadows controls can be thought as controls that work on opposite ends of a Tone Curve, but use a much more complex algorithm. If the settings are not kept "equal and opposite" the image data levels will be shifted to the left or right in the histogram causing a much stronger interaction with all of the other control areas. This will require much more Tone control "tweaking" when attempting to produce a properly adjusted image.
Exposure: Midtone Brightness (30%-70% Levels)
Contrast: Midtone Contrast (30%-70% Levels)
Highlights: Highlight Area (70%-90% Levels)
Shadows: Shadow Area (10%-30% Levels)
Whites: White Point Area (90%-100% Levels)
Blacks: Black Point Area (0%-10% Levels)