wrote:
On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:27:01 -0700 (PDT), in rec.photo.digital JOHNCHAP2 wrote:
My ACDSee Pro 2 has a shadow/highlight control which in the advance mode operates like a graphic equilizer in a stereo system. It allows the user to enhance and reduce the shadows and highlights in either 5 or 9 precise bands each. It is more precise and a whole lot easier to use than the shadow/highlight control that comes with CS2 (and I believe CS3), and seems to produce better results. Is there a
[hopefully free] plugin available for CS2 or CS3 that operates the
same way?
What’s wrong either using curves and/or levels?
Its not the same thing as shadow/highlight. Curves operates on the whole image equally. Shadow/highlight (I’m talking CS2) first decides what is a shadow area, or a highlight. You can adjust the cutoff points. But more important, it does not decide based on individual pixels. First it makes a blurred image of the whole picture, where the blur radius is adjustable from 1 to hundreds of pixels. It then decides what is shadow or highlight based on the cutoff values you decide, from the blurred image. The result is two masks, one that selects highlight areas, one shadows. These masks are not sharp edge, the edges are feathered. You can then adjust the contrast of the highlights and shadows separately. The areas of the highlights that were near the bottom intensity can go well down into what were shadows, and the areas of shadows that were lightest can go up into what were highlights. You can also do some color saturation correction.
If you select a small blur radius for the masks, it looks like a crude old-fashioned darkroom silver mask. If you select say 400, it looks very different and much more pleasant.
This is a very useful tool for landscapes.
Doug McDonald