So I haven’t been in Lightroom for about a year now, but from what I’ve seen online they have white and black sliders to define what is pure black and what is pure white. On the exposure tab I see a Black slider, but not a White slider. So I went to RAW White points in the RAW tab and that seemed to do what I wanted. Is that the right way to do it/
I always have the custom tone curve open and manipulate the black and white points from there.
No, don’t touch raw white points unless your camera model is not well supported or unless you need to when using Retinex.
255 implies working in 8-bit mode. RawTherapee works in 32-bit mode so values are shown in %.
Any tool which influences brightness/lightness can be used: Exposure, Lightness, Tone Curve 1/2, L* curve, CIECAM02, Black-and-White ‘After’ Curve, Wavelet ‘After’ Curve, etc.
Related to this, there is also the Exposure Compensation slider near the top of the exposure tools, which seems like a fairly fundamental adjustment one might well make. However this article from the RT site
http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/BTDZS/D800Ecalibration.htm
gives some slightly worrying info about losing highlight info if you reduce the exposure comp (and is not Nikon-specific). This was based on RT 4.1 I think. Does anyone know if current RT versions work this same way - perhaps it has been changed?
Andrew
At no point does it claim highlight info is lost. Furthermore, what that text claims ACR does seems incorrect to me.
Well, sure 100%/255 - whatever. I was just trying to express pure white.
However, Exposure and Lightness don’t work because they work across the entire range. Not only are they changing how white the white is, but making everything brighter. The edit from when I tried to use those looks like garbage compared to adjusting Exposure and Lightness. I also tried the L* curve, but apparently I didn’t know how to adjust just the whites rather than lightening the entire image. The others like Wavelet and CEICAM02, I’m not sure of.
So…how would I only make the whites pure white without lightening the entire image?
Here’s an example of what LR currently looks like. You’ll notice they have both exposure and Whites and Blacks sliders. RT has Blacks, but not Whites.
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For example using curves like this, from this
like this
or this if you want a softer roll-off
or this
Ah, now I see. I’ll have to try it tonight and see if I can duplicate the effect I got with the white point. Since I’m posting not only the photos, but also my process in a blog post - I’ll update it with this info so that others will also know what to do.
This is my simplistic take: if you look at the histogram and there is a gap between the lightest data and the right-hand limit of the graph, you can safely move the white point to the upper extent of the data and not lose highlight detail.
My raw PP routine is this: 1) gamma 2.2, to spread the linear data bunched up on the left out into the histogram, 2) curve, with the lower endpoint scooched right to the bottom of the data and the upper endpoint scooched left to the top of the data. From there, adjust the same curve to taste for highlight, shadow, or overall contrast adjustment. IIRC, to do this with RT, you’d use the Neutral profile to start, but you’d probably find it simpler to just start with the camera profile to get a decent image from the gitgo. Oh, and “scooch” is a technical term, US Midwest, I believe… 
SO do you hold control or shift to get it to move in scooches? 
My process has evolved from always going to Neutral profile, to starting with the Auto profile because it usually gets me to a really good starting point for my camera unless it’s a high key or low key image. In that case, I usually just reset the Exposure and leave everything else at the default and work from there. I then usually use either the Tone Curves or the L* curves to expand the histogram - usually leading to a pleasing contrast for me. (Although if you look on reddit, the current trend that everyone’s trying to emulate is to reduce the contrast a bit and actually crush the blacks a bit)
Now I might play with the white and black points a bit more - depending on the photo.
And, of course, sometimes a photo looks fine without forcing the histogram to be expanded.
Instagram 
I often adjust the (non-raw) black and white points using Tone Curve 1 to stretch the histogram, then use TC2 and the other tools to adjust to taste. You can just drag the bottom-left and top-right points as I have done in the example below, but often I make gradual curves instead, to prevent sudden clipping, as shown in the last screenshot.
Before:
After, black and white points using Tone Curve 1:
Same, but using a smooth curve to prevent sudden clipping:
Yeah, basically the same thing I’m doing, except, until this conversation, I was never moving the actual white and black points. I was grabbing points nearer the middle (not much nearer, but nearer). Some experimentation will help me find the best solution for my view.
Your instagram example is not too far off. But the good ones people are trying to recreate on reddit also tend to do some split toning - adding blues to the blacks and oranges to the highlights. Some of them actually look really good. The problem (as usual) is when EVERYONE’S trying to do the EXACT SAME THING. Also, I think the difference between an Instagram poseur and an artist is knowing when it looks good for the subject and when it doesn’t.
from this reddit thread:
Is an example of a pro who knows when to use it vs just using instatram or VSCO
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Some not-as-apparent things I think when looking at this image is the overall production quality.
- Notice the clothing colors match well with the (likely pre-planned) color palette? There’s no accidental mistake that the split toning would favor the blue shirt, khaki pants. All earth tones, right?
- Off camera lighting here. Something big and soft likely? I’m basing this on the shadow of the womans suitcase from her leg, and the shadow on the mans leg from his suitcase. There’s some sort of light on the right going on.
- It could possibly be a composite image as well?
The end result looks like it was tightly controlled, imo. A nice hallmark of a professional pre-production planning and shoot, I’d guess. I’ve found that often times that “professional look” comes down to careful planning and execution with a good strong vision. These things rarely happen by accident - no matter how much they want it to look like it might have…
Wait a minute? Are you saying that a professional look comes from acting like a professional? 
Haha.
I wasn’t the OP on that reddit thread, but wanted to throw in at least one counter-example to the black crushing being universally bad.
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Yet I’m still amazed by the number of people who don’t seem to get this… They want an easy “professional look” button. Also, that subreddit is basically littered with a million corpses of posts asking for exactly this.
I personally agree with you that this is quite pleasing in the hands of someone who knows when/how to use it (your example is a good one, btw).
That’s interesting above.
@patdavid, can I ask you how you “manage the histogram” please? Suppose you are processing an ordinary photo in RT. By ordinary, I mean you want a decent result but it’s not a special photo you might spend a lot of time working on.
Do you have highlight reconstruction enabled?
If the camera profile at the end of the Colour tab has a tone curve, do you use it?
Similarly do you use Base Table (though I don’t know what this does) ?
Do you use Exposure Compensation?
If making your own lightness/brightness curve, do you have a favourite way, E.G. tone curve 1 & 2 near the top of the Exposure tab, E.G. Lab Lightness … ?
RT has many ways to alter the spread of tones - just wondering what an expert does!
Andrew
Although you didn’t ask me, I know for me it depends on the photo. Some photos look better adjusted with the upper tone curves and some look better adjusted with the LAB curves.
A while back I was trying to understand LAB and CIE better. I dusted that off earlier and have just posted up a comparison, as a separate topic. What do you think?
Andrew