Paul Deverson writes: >> I've just been playing with the Shadow/Highlight tool in CS to make some sense of the various settings and thought I'd share my findings. <<
Hi Paul, yes S/H correction is great - probably the shadow correction will get more use. It is also good for adjusting images which do not suffer serious lighting or exposure problems, where one may have used contrast masks for a similar (but slightly different) creative effect. The problem is that once one lightens shadows, noise may be more apparent, depending on the original lighting conditions, ISO setting and the sensors S/N ratio etc. In some respects S/H correction is like USM filtering, obviously not in the results though. This is adaptive processing, processing a single pixel in relation to neighbouring pixel content. First, start with the help guide (F1). There is lots of new info and new how to content which can be customized. To briefly go over the controls, which are the same for shadow or highlights (shadow adjustments presumed below): Amount: How steep the in-built S/H curve adjustment is to the targeted image tones. The tonal width and radius settings govern how the curve adjustment is adaptively applied. Tonal Width: Ranging from targeting the extreme tones or to greater tonal ranges outside of the extreme target tone range (2-100). Radius: This determines the size of the surrounding averaged neighbourhood areas luminance and will probably be the most critical of the three sliders to finesse, although tonal width and radius are often 'related' to each other and changing one setting may require tweaks of the other settings. This stage is similar to the Gaussian blur stage when performing a contrast masking, and can be just as critical. Minor slider variations can create major visual/numerical adjustments, so it pays to experiment (use those new scrubby sliders). One can see some sort of Gaussian halo type effect when the 'wrong' value is chosen, just as when using contrast masks - so again it pays to experiment so that one does not flatten contrast in the target area or create halos that 'spill over' to much into other areas which do not require the adjustment. One suggested method is to roughly aim for a pixel value around half of the pixel width of the target area - as a start point. Colour Correction: Perhaps not the best name, as this is more of a saturation adjustment than the ability to alter colour balance as the name implies. Midtone Contrast & Clipping: These controls should be fairly self explanatory and will vary from image to image in their use, experiment with care. One can obviously use layer blend modes, duped layers and blend if sliders and or layer masks, or other methods to blend in S/H adjustments to the original image (it is not possible to have this command as an adjustment layer in this release, so place your feature requests with Adobe). On a related note: http://www.shadowilluminator.org./ Regards, Stephen Marsh. =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
