How to edit a photo in Lr4, continued...

Question

The purpose of this thread is to continue the Lr4 editing tips & tricks started in the beta forum.

Answer 1

How to adjust highlight tone
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Highlight toning is vastly improved in Lr4, by way of:
1. Automatic highlight recovery and clipping protection (roll-off...)
2. The whites slider.
3. Highlights slider.
4. Locals.
re #1: You don't have to do anything to take advantage of this, but it allows you to do things you couldn't do before, namely up the whites, exposure, (contrast), and/or highlights without excessive clipping, and without having an ugly transition between clipped and un-clipped whites, and without losing good tone and detail in the highlights.
re #2: Arguably, the most important slider in PV2012 is the whites slider. Definitely the most important slider when it comes to optimizing highlight toning in PV2012.
re #3: Since the highlights slider is the main slider for controlling highlight "recovery" and setting level of highlights, most people discover it pretty quickly. But using it in conjunction with whites (and exposure) opens a whole new set of doors that are absolutely essential to getting the most from PV2012.
re #4: Because one can readily tweak highlights using the locals (without much affecting midtones or shadows), one can push global highlight toning much further when locals are to be used too. Of course one can take advantage of the locals even if not pushing global adjustments too hard ;-)
To make a short story long...
In Lr3, one had to use the highlight recovery to recover highlights, or decrease exposure, and/or keep brightness and contrast low. In Lr4 most highlights are recovered for you automatically. The rest can be recovered by:
-highlights
-exposure
-whites
Or any combination of the above (even if in conjunction with positive values from some of the others).
Highlights slider:
-highlights: pulls highlights leftward, doing a combination of recovery and stratification, but will not decrease midtone contrast in the doing.
+highlights: increases highlight level while attempting to minimize compression of highlights/whites. Like everything, protected by automatic roll-off logic.
Exposure slider:
+exposure: increases all tones smoothly, from low to high, but protects highs from getting too too bright. Some like to think of it as being somewhere between PV2010 exposure and PV2010 brightness. The exposure slider has been designed to complement the other sliders. For example, increasing exposure increases highlights in a way that -highlights can bring back down. And since -highlights does not reduce midtone contrast, one can use +exposure -highlights to brighten the midtones in an image without making it look washed out like increasing brightness in PV2010 would.
-exposure: decreases all tones smoothly, but tries to keep highest tones from getting too dim - this is a big difference between PV2012 and PV2010.
Whites slider:
+whites: stretches entire tone curve rightward, smoothly - whites most, blacks least. Very much like a white-biased version of exposure. Very similar to the right-side equivalent of blacks slider. +whites also supports graceful driving into clipping. Use a brush with -highlights to recover highlights driven a little too far.
-whites: recovers clipped highlights and moves them leftward along with all other tones smoothly, all the while and nevertheless attempting to keep highest tones high, after they've been recovered.
PV2012 includes some fancy programming that allows us to do things that were not even close to possible in PV2010. The fact that the positive function of the sliders is not necessarily the exact inverse of the negative functionality is representative of this sophistication. And the slider behavior can change dynamically depending on image and other settings... This can make it tricky, but also makes it much more powerful than one might think given it's modest basic slider set.
In Lr3, fill always did the same thing, and highlight recovery always did the same thing. While predictable, they did not allow one to optimize image quality and tone, nor provide the same level of flexibility as PV2012.
One of the things I don't like about PV2012 is that the highlights, by default have a muted or processed look I sometimes describe as "powdery", as opposed to unadulterated and glowy - more detailed to be sure, but a bit flat.
One of the things I do like about PV2012 is that the whites slider allows one to restore much of the original highlight quality, and more.
To shorten a long story:
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I strongly recommend to use +whites to the extent the image allows in order to have maximally shiny and detailed highlights (unless that's not what you want of course). You may have to decrease exposure and/or highlights, and increase shadow level as compensation.
In a nutshell:
+whites is good - use it to it's fullest!
And on the flip side:
Sometimes -highlights just won't cut it. Either it just can't do the job (long story not told) or it produces too much highlight stratification. In either case, that's when -whites steps in. Knowing when to use -whites is as important as remembering to use +whites whenever possible, but is required far less frequently on most images.
Summary:
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To increase intra-highlight detail and/or unflatten highlights: +whites, usually accompanied by some combination of -exposure and/or -highlights, and +shadows as compensatory adjustment.
To recover highlights that would otherwise be too hard to reach, (or in cases of unusual tonal distribution, when -highlights compresses shadows too much), and/or to compress tonal range from the right-end leftward: -whites.
In PV2012 it is generally not necessary to reduce contrast to recover and stratify highlights, although you can if you want ;-)
Advanced bonus formula:
+whites +highlights -exposure +blacks +shadows +contrast (-saturation) to unflatten highlights, but minimize highlight stratification.
Explanation:
+whites: the workhorse - required for unraveling auto highlight recovery which is primarily responsible for the flattening.
+highlights: keeps highlights from being separated as much when +whites is done.
-exposure: keeps top end from being too bright due to the above, but also darkens bottom end.
+blacks +shadows: raises bottem end back up and pushes on highlights re-compressing them from the left.
+contrast: further compresses highlights. Note: due to +blacks +shadows, +contrast won't darken bottom end too much or stratify midtones as much.
(-saturation): keeps +contrast tonal.
Try it!
OK, enough for now - sorry for putting you through all this.
Rob