Hi, I’m just starting to learn to use RT to process RAW files. what I need most is to bring out the details in shadows:
What I could do with PS Camera Raw was to simply move the “shadow” slider to the right:
But when I tried to do this in RT, I got black artifact along the edges of the dark area (blue arrows):
I played with the settings and couldn’t find a way, how to avoid the artifact when brighten the shadow?
thanks!
Jason
You could try a little tonemapping - try starting with default settings but change strength to 0.20
in conjunction with retinex - try starting with default settings but change strength to 20. Use Lab CL curve to regain lost chromaticity of low L values.
Further tweak with appropriate tone curves, something like
You need to view the preview at 100% to see an accurate preview of tonemapping, indicated by the 1:1 on the right of the tool name.
I’m sure you’d get more help if you posted a raw for people to play with.
BTW in the PS Camera Raw version, I see an equally strong light halo just above the tree line.
I was about to write that too, but you’ve been faster 
If you’re willing to get out of the raw editor and into the pixel editor, I’d export 2 versions, then mask it in your pixel editor.
Thank you for your reply, I started with the tone curve as you suggested, and it looks much better than using the “shadow”, without any artifact:
And you were right! the PS Camera Raw version, there was an equally strong light halo artifact. However, compared to the PS version, the forest looks a little mushy and lack contrast. how to remedy that?
I was trying to attach the RAW file, but it says new users are not allowed to add attachment.
I’m totally new to RT, so bear with me if these are really basic questions:
Is that under “Lab* Adjustments”? what do you mean by “regain lost chromaticity of low L values”?
Thank you!
What @james said!
Now if you need more details in the forest go to Details by Contrast in the details tab and bring back some details.
I usually just skip level 0. Good thing to do is to push each slider all the way to the right to see the level of details it affects and then adjust to taste. I very often use something like this:
Be aware that you will what to be at 100% zoom to see the finder levels while you’ll want to zoom out a little to better see the effect of levels 4 and 5.
If this together with tonemapping isn’t enough, then come back to us and we’ll send you to the mystical wavelets tab. 
PS: Do post the raw if you can. The upload limit is 100MB (I think). There are a lot of people here who will happily process your picture and then share with you what they’ve done.
You can certainly share the raw via filebin.net or transfer.sh and I’ll post it for you. But it shouldn’t take too long for you to get file upload privileges, the threshold is quite low.
…but you make everything faster 
The tonemapping I suggested should help with the mushy look.
Also, the second tone curve I suggested, although it looks insignificant it will help boost the contrast of the darker areas.
Retinex tends to strongly desaturate, so you need to compensate for that.
Yes under Lab*, something like this.
If you apply both tonemapping and retinex at low settings, then you will probably want to reduce your tone curve.
Tone curves affect the entire image the same, i.e. all pixels of the same tone are affected the same no matter where they are in the image. This is probably why the forest looks a little mushy.
Tonemapping and retinex affect pixels differently depending on their surrounding pixels, i.e. if two pixels have the same tone, but one is surrounded by light and the other surrounded by dark, then they will be affected differently.
Thanks James / McCap, I’ll experiment it some more.
A related question is, how do you suppress the highlights (overexposed)? like those white spots in the clouds in the above pictures.
The other thing I noticed is, when I adjust tonemapping etc, it seems that it applies to the whole pictures. Is there a way to just apply the changes to the dark area, like the forest foreground in the above picture?
Enable highlight recovery and reduce exposure.
RawTherapee generally only does global adjustments, not local ones.
In this case I would use the graduated filter tool to selectively lighten the trees, that’s as close as you can get to a local adjustment in RT 
Push the gamma slider at the tonemapping group to the right … this dumpens the effect of tonemapping at bright/highlight areas … to dump the effect on shadows push the slider to the left.
For an increased local contrast / sharpening at the affected areas use “Edge stepping = 1.0”, "Reweighting iterates > 5 … I use 8 )
EDIT … please upload the raw sample at filebin.net (or any non tricky cloud service) to get better suggestions
thanks for your tips, I’ll experiment it some more…
Yes, that’s why I said “generally” 
I agree
