(Editing) COLOR ADJUSTING - SHADOW / HIGHLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS

The Shadows/Highlights adjustment screen is displayed when you click on the "Shadows" or "Highlights" buttons in the Color Adjusting screen.

Although Contrast and Brightness controls allow you to fix just about any photo with poor lighting, the Shadows/Highlights adjustments can be better. For example: Let's say you have a photo of a flower with grass in the background. Let's say the grass is darker in general to the rest of the photo. You could use the Shadows slider to make the dark areas darker. This is nice since it WON'T affect the brighter areas (like the flower). If you were to use the contrast control, then the brighter areas would become even brighter. Also if you were to use the brightness control, then the whole image would become darker. The Highlights slider is similar except it works by making the bright areas brighter.


CUSTOMIZING SHADOWS / HIGHLIGHTS RANGE
Not only can you control the amount of shadow and/or highlight to apply to the image, you can control what is considered a shadow or highlight. The default settings are pretty good for most photos, but on special situations, you can change the range of shades that are considered shadow or highlight.

There are 2 sets or dual sliders. One set for shadows and one set for highlights. You can position these triangular sliders to select the starting and ending range for both shadows and highlights.

When you move the highlights ending slider, you will notice a curve on the highlight end. This curve makes a lot of the brightest shades nearly the same shade making them almost indistinguishable. This is called shade squishing. As you lower the brightness level on the main color editing screen, those squished shades will NOT unsquish, they will still appear to be near the same brightness level(although darker).

If you don't want squishing, you can use a highlight ending range value of 255. This eliminates any squishing and as you lower the brightness level on the main color editing screen, these brightest shades WILL appear distinguishable. For Example: Let's say you had a cloud and then applied maximum highlights. If you didn't use the ending value of 255, then the cloud would appear nearly all the same color making it look like a big white spot in your image. As you then lower the brightness, the spot would appear darker but still all nearly the same brightness in shade. If you use the highlight ending range value of 255, then your cloud will go to a SOLID WHITE spot and then as you lower the brightness the spot will get darker AND you will see the detail in the clouds.

NOTE: The same type of effect happens in the shadow range when you select the shadow starting range value of 0.

HINT: If you want to retain detail in clouds BUT want to brighten up a lower range of shades, you should NOT use the ending value of 255, instead you should use 235 or some value that will not affect the appearance of the clouds (Because it would be darker than the clouds).

CURVE GRAPH
The graph shows a simple representation of how your slider positions will affect the image. Simply put, the bottom bar goes from black to white slowly. The left bar also goes from black to white. Visually pick a shade from the bottom bar and draw a line vertically upwards till it hits the green graph. Then draw a line (mentally) to the left bar. It now points to the shade that the image will now use.

PREVIEW MAIN EDITING WINDOW
TIP: You can use the Preview checkbox to show real-time updates to your main color editing window as you move the sliders and triangles around.




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