That’s where the crunch comes, and tones can get very compressed. The problem is the transition between the brightened tones and the non-brightened ones. But with major lightening of only the dark tones-no way. Curves can lighten shadows in a minor way without causing problems. Step two-bring down the brightening in the clouds-except there’s now a dreaded FLAT spot in the curve, compressing and squishing together any tones on that part of the curve. Step one-this will lighten the shadows nicely, but all the other tones go along for the ride, making the sky too light, and compressing the detail in the bright clouds. Since digital capture records tones differently than film, there’s more detail to be rescued, but how does one strongly brighten the dark tones without completely messing up the lighter tones? If they were any darker-there would literally be nothing there. The RGB values in the Photoshop info palette are all below 10. The dark trees above are almostcompletely black. But then there’s that big problem with the remaining ¾ of the image… It was actually an excellent exposure, because the highlights are not blown out. This was a snapshot made by my friend Karl Kroeber (see his real work at and is a jpeg file. Well-Lightroom 4 is footing the bill for a catered banquet, as the new Process 2012 raises the bar on image adjustments! The new Shadows and Highlights sliders can do things curves can only dream about. For these global adjustments, I often say “there is no free lunch”. Open up the shadows, and the highlights get compressed. I liken global curve adjustments to a slinky toy-when you expand the tones in one area, another area gets compressed. Lightroom also has a global free-form curve, the Point Curve that is very powerful. With them I can add or subtract contrast, lighten or darken, change color balance, even do what I call “tonal selections” (see my article here). I would wildly guess that 85% of the adjustment layers in my Photoshop files are curves. In Photoshop, my primary tonal adjustment tool has been the Curves Adjustment layer.
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