Do You Really Understand Exposure vs Highlights vs Whites in Post?

Thomas Chu Photo

In the article 'Beautify Your Photos with Ease — Understanding the Tone & Contrast Controls in Lightroom's Basic Panel', Thomas briefly introduced the general usage of the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks sliders.

But the algorithms behind these sliders have been iterated by Adobe many times and are not as simple as you might think. Can you answer the following questions?

1) Why does moving the Exposure slider left not clip the shadows but loses highlights, while moving it right doesn't lose shadows but clips the highlights?

2) Did you know the Highlights and Shadows sliders also affect a photo's clarity and texture detail?

3) In which situations should you not only avoid reducing Highlights, but actually increase them?

4) What's the difference between raising Shadows while lowering Blacks, versus raising Blacks while lowering Shadows?

If you're not sure about the questions above, today's tutorial video is worth watching.

Video Tutorial

▶ Watch the video tutorial on Bilibili

Gradient test image download:

Link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1NJr1hcbLohx0T8SuThEWBg Code: ihxs

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