Hi,
Per recommendations by some nice folks on this forum, I started to experiment with “Tone Mapping”, which turned out to be very useful, in brighten the dark parts of the pictures. Could anyone help me to understand how it works? I don’t know if there is an equivalent function in Photoshop, is there? Is there any side effects of using this function? (like artifacts that I’m not aware to pay attention to)
Thanks,
Jason
@seafan there is a brief description here: Tone Mapping - RawPedia
Google for the paper it’s based on, “Edge-Preserving Decompositions for Tone and Detail Manipulation”, if you want to find out technical details.
@seafan, Think of it this way. If you have an image that has a dynamic range that cannot be displayed by any computer monitor and you need to be able to view this high contrast, you have to somehow nudge them within the range that the monitor is capable of displaying. Hence mapping to be able to display. So nudge the bright parts down and darker parts up.
You just have to be careful about “cooked” images that try to display all tones and end up looking fake. Also, you have to be aware of halos along the edges within your image.
One thing about default tonemapping settings in RT - they make images look not very pleasent. Could anyone dial in a more natural looking default settings?