Hi all,
After having finally worked around a bug that's stopped me from fully testing lightroom on my PC(*), I've been testing it's functionalities far more fully than I had before.
In general I'm very impressed with the Tone Curve control. It allows me to control the curve much more quickly and effeciently that I can in Photoshop. This said, I'm finding that it has severe limitations with high contrast images in which I wish to retain detail in the highlights.
A typical image might be a landscape taken such that the sky hasn't blown out. The sky contains lots of cloud detail but the landscape itself is underexposed. Of couse, there are lots of techniques for dealing with this situation, such as developing two versions from the RAW and blending in Photoshop, or better still taking two images on a tripod and blending those, but I'm interested in seeing if I can get good results in Lightroom alone.
Have any of you successfully used Lightroom's tone curve to get good results from such images? By that I mean the sort of results that might be expected from Photoshop's "Shadows/Highlights" command.
I realise that the Shadows/Highlight command is doing some particularly clever things under the hood, and that it doesn't simply apply a curve. It may be that these sorts of results aren't currently possible with LR.
Regards,
Tim
* I describe the bug and the workaround here:
http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7901#post7901
After having finally worked around a bug that's stopped me from fully testing lightroom on my PC(*), I've been testing it's functionalities far more fully than I had before.
In general I'm very impressed with the Tone Curve control. It allows me to control the curve much more quickly and effeciently that I can in Photoshop. This said, I'm finding that it has severe limitations with high contrast images in which I wish to retain detail in the highlights.
A typical image might be a landscape taken such that the sky hasn't blown out. The sky contains lots of cloud detail but the landscape itself is underexposed. Of couse, there are lots of techniques for dealing with this situation, such as developing two versions from the RAW and blending in Photoshop, or better still taking two images on a tripod and blending those, but I'm interested in seeing if I can get good results in Lightroom alone.
Have any of you successfully used Lightroom's tone curve to get good results from such images? By that I mean the sort of results that might be expected from Photoshop's "Shadows/Highlights" command.
I realise that the Shadows/Highlight command is doing some particularly clever things under the hood, and that it doesn't simply apply a curve. It may be that these sorts of results aren't currently possible with LR.
Regards,
Tim
* I describe the bug and the workaround here:
http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7901#post7901