Lightroom 4b - basic tone controls are not intuitive, and need some work (in my opinion).

Question

I've come up with a variety of settings that I consider optimal in PV2012 that turn out to be totally counter intuitive.
I don't think this is a good thing.
One should be able to:
- up the exposure when it's underexposed, and down the exposure when it's over-exposed.
- adjust shadows and highlights (and midtone balance) to taste...
- fine tune darkest tones by adjusting blacks slider (maybe have a separate control for adjusting black clipping point from the control that is used for stretching or compressing darkest tones most, or just use tone curve...).
- fine tune lightest tones by adjusting whites slider (we already have a separate control for adjusting white clipping point: exposure).
That is not how Lr4b is working for me at all.
Having to radically increase exposure to brighten the shadows, then set the highlights to an extreme negative value when the net effect ends up being brighter highlights, is indeed *very* counter-intuitive.
Conversely, I've had cases when I've had to radically reduce exposure on photos that weren't particularly over-exposed, in order to get the balance of mid-tones/shadows/highlights to work out. - very counter-intuitive, and took me a long time to get it right.
See related thread: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_4b_improve_basic_tone_cont rols
PS - I've also found myself adjusting blacks or whites in order to reach further into the midtones, instead of shadows & highlights - this is just bass freakun' ackwards!...
Rob

Answer 1

Hi Bill,
All input is welcome.
Whites slider is the exposure slider's second cousin. Like exposure, it affects all tones, but it affects brightest tones more than exposure. It's almost like the right-end equivalent to fill-light in Lr3. If you just want to get overall exposure + shadows and highlights in the ballpark, it can be done very quickly with Lr4b. I however always want to control the exact brightness of each and every tone, from black to white, and do it in such a way that there are no "flat" regions or desaturated regions. That's when things get tricky. For example, what if you have a photo whose tones are in the ball park, but the middle tone is not bright enough. This happens a lot to people who under-expose in the interest of preserving highlights, then need to bring up the brightness of the whole picture, except for the whites, bottom end mostly. In Lr3, you increase fill light, and if it brightens too much somewhere you decrease brightness there. In Lr4b, increasing the shadows won't reach it. You can get at it by increasing the blacks, but then that unanchors the black point (and messes up the darkest tones which weren't anywere near the midtone target). You can't pull it rightward using highlights, because that won't reach either, and anyway will overbrighten highlights. You can pull it leftward using whites, but then your whites may become too bright. So, what do you do? increase exposure. But then that blows out the whole top end. So what do you do? Decrease highlights. But now you've just affected a bunch of other tones which were not near the tones that were the original target of your desired adjustment. It's all very squirrelly and non-intuitive and requires iteration. Note: I've spent several dozens hours experimenting, I'm not an Lr4b newbie by a long shot - granted, I'm also still very much learning.
I really think Adobe should consider altering the algorithm such that one can use the slider that represents the tones closest to the desired target tone, then adjust the next closest sliders as compensation... - Everything blending as gracefully as possible with the adjacent zone.
e.g. (not talking about setting white and black point, which should be independent of all this)
- blacks: adjusts darkest tones most, shadow tones next most, midtones next most, highlight tones next most, and lightest tones least.
- shadows: adjusts dark tones most, black tones and midtones next most...
- midtones: adjusts midtones most, dark and light tones next most...
- highlights: adjusts light tones most, midtones and lightest tones next most...
- whites: adjusts lightest tones most, light tones next most, midtones next most...
Kinda like the tone curve, except with the benefits of the magic logic for recombining tones, which is what makes adjusting tone via the tone controls different than using the tone curve in the first place.
This way, if you want to add fill light into the deepest regions, you increase the blacks most, if that brightens the shadows too much, then adjust the shadows a little, if that affects the midtones too much, then adjust the midtones a tiny bit, and if that affects the highlights a smidge, then adjust the highlights by the tiniest of smidges. Affect on whites by blacks slider is probably negligible.
In other words, make the implementation match the zones as you see them in the histogram. For example, in the histogram we have:
- blacks
- shadows
- exposure
- highlights
- whites
Except they don't really do what's suggested by that zone graph:
- black slider adjust midtones and light tones more than shadow slider does.
- shadow slider hits a midtone wall.
- exposure affects lighter tones even more than midtones.
- highlights hits a midtone wall.
- whites adjusts midtones and dark tones more than highlights slider.
Is it possible to get exactly what you want with this scheme? - yes.
Is it tricky as he|| - yes.
So Bill, if Lr4b is working for you, then more power to ya. I can make it work for me too. But I think the implementation is not very intuitive, requires mutliple iterations which can take a lot of time, and there may be room for improvement - thus this thread.
Rob