Gosh! Of course. No further questions when it comes to highlights 
About that sweet contrast spot - you got my point, if you make it a bit more aggressive, it will be perfect. Thanks for awesome work!!
Hi @kazah7 and @sguyader,
do you have examples showing the “washed out” effect when lifting shadows (ideally also with a rendering of what you consider acceptable)? Seeing a couple of samples would be quite helpful in tuning the tool…
Thanks!
@agriggio I was just seeing more subdued colors when to compared to the HDR Tone mapping tool. I didn’t want to say it is a problem, and colors can easily be boosted if needed with saturation or chromaticity sliders for example.
I just tried quickly comparing both tools, if I lift shadows in both to raise L* to about 14, a* and b* values measure around 5-6 with S/H tool, and 10-11 with HDR TM. Or in HSV, when V is around 18% for both, S measures around 35% with S/H tool and 65% with HTR TM.
But… the look is more natural to me with the S/H tool. It’s a matter of taste I think.
So, as @sguyader said it’s a matter of taste. In my opinion, there are some situations in which this additional punch would be needed. Check out this photo. I managed to add more contrast, and only to the shadows area, using wavelets. DSC02244.ARW (41.1 MB)
shadows.pp3 (11.3 KB)
Maybe it is too much, but you should get my point. Another thing is somehow connected to @sguyader’s question. How would you give more saturation only to the sky from my previous photo? CL curve form LAB does not do the job. Darktable has additional two sliders to deal with it - “highlights&shadows colour adjustment”.
Another challenging photo, and similar story with contrast.But as I said, it can all be done using different set of tools.It is simply a matter of time.DSC02255.ARW (41.0 MB)
Hi all,
thanks for the feedback (and the test images), very helpful!
I’ve just pushed a small tweak that tries to add a bit more contrast to the shadows. It’s subtle, don’t expect big changes, but in my (so far limited) tests it seems helpful.
A couple more comments:
But… the look is more natural to me with the S/H tool. It’s a matter of taste I think.
I agree it’s a matter of taste. But don’t be afraid to use both tools together! FWIW, this is what I do in challenging situations – see below. Incidentally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lightroom was applying some tone mapping under the hood (though of course I’m not sure).
Check out this photo
[…]
Another challenging photo, and similar story with contrast
Thanks for sharing, these are challenging indeed! My approach was to use both HDR tone mapping (for an initial compression of the dynamic range) and the shadows/highlights tool (for further tweaks). Here are my results, just in case. I’m reasonably happy with the first one, not so much with the second… surely we won’t run out of things to do 
DSC02244.ARW.pp3 (10.5 KB)
DSC02255.ARW.pp3 (10.6 KB)
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@agriggio Just a suggestion, don’t know if it’s possible to do. In general, shadows have a cooler color temperature than sunlit parts. As a consequence, when we lift the shadows, the difference in color temperature is more obvious. It’s particularly visible in the two images above: warm sunlit background, cool/blueish shadows.
Would it be possible to add a slider allowing to warm up the lifted shadows in such situations?
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@Morgan_Hardwood Interesting, I actually never used color toning besides experimenting, I’ll give it a try.
Edit: I discovered the “L*a*b* Color correction grid” tool in Color toning, I like it a lot!
I’m getting more and more excited to try out the new SH tool as well as the tool you just mentioned. If I only had the time…
@agriggio I have started to play with the new S/H tool, comparing it with my preferred (but slow and complicated) method based on enfuse.
Here is an example of my method applied to the image from this PlayRAW:
To obtain this result, I did the following:
- saved several linear-gamma TIFF images at 1EV exposure increments, from 0EV to +9EV
- combined the TIFF files with enfuse with default options
- I opened the original RAW, applied a +1EV exposure compensation, then loaded the enfuse output on top of it
- I merged the two images with a luminosity mask build like this:
- inverted L channel
- reduced weight of mid-tones with this curve:
- applied a bilateral blur (from GMIC) on the curve output (gaussian blur produces halos around the sharp edges)
- finally, I slightly increased the mid-tones contrast with an RGB curve applied to the merged output
With RT I was not able to get a similar result, particularly to preserve the smoothness of the sky tonality in the top-right part where it gets dark…
Since you know the S/H tool much better, I’d be really curious to see what would be your best result on this image. Also, maybe the steps above can give you some nice idea… my dream would be to optimize enfuse to the point where it could be used in real-time.
6:55 AM
3 Likes
@Carmelo_DrRaw enfuse uses the “best-exposed” pixels for fusion, and unlike when generating an HDR it is not recommended to take evenly-spaced brackets, but instead to use the images where the areas of interest are best-exposed. In this case it might be one shot for the land/sea and one for the sky.
The documentation sheds more light on this (or it did last time I read it, which was several years ago, not 4.2): http://enblend.sourceforge.net/enfuse.doc/enfuse_4.2.pdf
Hi @Carmelo_DrRaw, here’s what I could do:
https://filebin.net/j4yrd9ieev8i0w39/Peek_2018-04-25_18-44.mp4
IMG_0080.CR2.pp3 (10.4 KB)
I don’t know if the output matches what you got above, but it’s definitely quicker…
6 Likes
I have tried the new Shadows / Highlight tool and would be very happy to have it relace the old one.
I don’t have any problems with the issue of legacy compatibility. But if it turns out that enough people considered it significant, perhaps the problem could be handled by adding legacy compatibility settings such as Word processing programs oftern have. The cost is the continuing maintenance of little used code.
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Since Lightroom was mentioned, here is Adobe’s blog post from when they introduced their new Highlight and Shadow sliders in V4. They are using Laplacian Pyramids. I’ve been really interested in seeing if any open source products would implement their use. The blog post also references the research paper that inspired them.
Adobe has also said that the highlight tool does recovery with channel mixing, grabbing info from non saturated channels. And their exposure slider plays into the mix by actively protecting highlights and applying some of it’s own recovery.
I like tools that operate on the conservative side. When a tool does too much at the same time, it can be difficult to do something in isolation without getting an undesirable effect. When I first started using FLOSS software, the sheer number of options overwhelmed me. Now I welcome them. Gone are the days of mediocre 1-to-3-click apps! That said, Lightroom is still okay. I just prefer the open source alternatives.