Halos in Lightzone conversion

For some reason i’m getting strange halos around out of focus objects in LigtZone. It is really visible around the horse in the background on the image below.

original raw stolen from here:

Can you share how you processed the image? This artifacting of background blurs happens to me when I process a foreground subject without regard to the background. Sometimes I’ll mask back in the original background stuff to eliminate this occurrence. There are other ways to approach it, too, like compromising a little with the foreground (do we need to see absolutely everything in the shadows? do we really need to compress the highlights so much that we end up with nonlinearities in those edges?) to let the background be a bit less overprocessed. And this is all independent of software, I’m sure adobe lets you create this effect as well. :slight_smile:

Well. Just loading the image in Lightzone produces these halos. By applying some light local contrast with the relight tool just worsens the effect.
Default tone curve compresses highlights even more than what you can observe in this picture.
I really didnt process the image much more than this.

Does Lightzone have abrupt corners in the tone curve? That could cause halos like the ones you’re seeing.

Hmmm. I dont know. LZ has a bit different of a tool for applying curves. Its called zonemapper and is inspired bu ansel adamses zone system. Its really easy to use but hard to spot irregularities.
Anyway. If anyone is using LightZone. It is the default curve applied by the program for the file above.

@Trickortreat You can correct that halos with “Fuzz” slider on “Relight” module:

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Fuzz tool doesnt solve it. It seems that my fiddling with base curve caused the problem.

I think you will have to reduce exposure in raw adjustments tool to recover highlights. See my answer on LZ forum.