Highlight and midtone control like Luminar's capabilities

[McCap]

A similar thing, Lightrooms Shadows and Highlights sliders, have been discussed in the past. Generally these sliders have a lot more under hood than just lifting shadows or lowering highlights. They generally add local contrast to make up for the loss when lowering global contrast and they also use good masking algorithms to hide halos and create smooth transitions.

I have been chasing this kind of thing myself and so far my two best solutions are:

Enhancing local vs. global contrast - RT wavelets

Hi there, part two of “enhancing local vs. global contrast” this time using RT and it’s unbelievably powerful wavelet tool. We start with an image where all the basic settings have been done (exposure, sharpening, blablabla…) [Basic-1] We then activate the wavelets. In this example I set the wavelet levels to 9. Go to Residual Image pull down the contrast to you liking. I set it to: [Res_image] And the picture turns to this: [Global Contrast] Then go to the Final Touchup. Here activate t…

And

Enhancing local contrast vs. global contrast.

Here is a little techniques I have been using extensively lately to enhance local contrast vs. global contrast, using the great color to gray tool. It is fairly easy and fast. Starting point, a picture with strong global contrast [IMG_8613 small] Duplicate the layer and desaturate it (copy this also into your channles stack for easy acces as mask). Invert the desaturated layer and set it to overlay mode. this will minimize global contrast (and also local contrast). Here is the result setting…

Maybe this helps you…