These are very interesting thoughts that you express here. These thoughts are enormously important in what we are doing. And you can’t ask yourself often enough, what am I doing, why am I doing it and where do I want to go with what I’m doing?
Yes, the pivotal point is always the person and, above all, their face.
In evolutionary terms, it was extremely important for us to be able to correctly interpret the intentions of our counterparts. We are highly specialized in correctly assessing the intentions of other people.
And this is also evident in photography. Nothing is as exciting as images of people. And appearance plays a very important role in this. Also the brightness and, above all, the color of the skin on the face.
However, contrary to what I think you mean, I think I have understood that manipulating the tone curves is sometimes very conducive to creating a suitable image. The results out of the box from the camera are already interpretations and not reality itself.
And that brings us back to ART and why I like this software so much: The operation is extremely intuitive. The science and technology is well hidden under the surface. I can concentrate fully on what I’m looking at and when I’m experimenting with the relatively few sliders, I’m not distracted much. So I can concentrate on what’s really important.
And what is a saturation control one under all sliders? I turned this item on and off, but I still don’t understand what it affects. There is no difference in the image, ever. Is this some kind of experimental tool that hasn’t been fully developed yet?
And further. When we change any values anywhere with these tools, the saturation does not change. Do these tools work in L curve (lab)? Lightness seems to be detached from the saturation channel.
What exactly do you mean by “white and black points”? Perhaps I don’t quite understand these terms yet.
It’s clear that this slider mainly changes the medium tonal values, but it also changes the very dark and very light tonal values, so that the respective clipping is significantly increased.
As I understand it, the white and black points are also changed (albeit less).
Hi Alberto,
yes, I study the infos in this topic regularly to understand everything well. But if I move Target gray point to the right, the clipping increases, as does moving it to the left. At least in my photos and also in your “mid.tiff”, the lowest lows and the highest highs change anyway. Not very, but still visible.
You are probably using regularization > 0. That setting trades the “ideal” behaviour described above for some preservation of local contrast. As usual, there’s no free lunch…
I’m probably doing something wrong or using values that are too extreme. If you’re interested, here’s a video showing what I’m doing: Target gray point clipping.zip (14.1 MB)
Alberto, it’s not really important to me whether clipping occurs - I’m only asking because I want to understand your statements.
There’s theory, and there’s practice. In theory, changing target gray doesn’t move the black and white points. In practice, it might do so slightly, because of all sorts of approximations/rounding errors that might happen when you do computations on a machine with finite precision. Especially at extreme settings. Plus, clipping indicators also might “lie” a little bit, because they by default are working with some margin/threshold (which you can control under preferences).
Now, I somehow have a feeling that you might find the above answer unsatisfactory, and you would not be completely wrong. The thing is, in order to give you a very precise answer, I would need to spend (or waste, depending on the point of view…) quite a lot of time testing things and finding good examples to back up my claims. I am really not interested to do that though, I am sorry.
Hello Alberto,
everything is ok. You really don’t need to find suitable examples to make me understand the theory. I’m fine with the way you’ve explained it so far.
But I’d like you to understand me and my needs. I am not a technician but I do a lot of portraits and use ART. And my favourite is “Log Tone Mapping”. I’m really in love with this tool and its fantastic possibilities. And I want to get to know and understand it better and better. I would prefer to use only this tool for everything I do. That’s the secret of my questions.
Anyway, I’m very grateful that ART exists and that you make it available to us. Thank you.