Learning Shadow Highlight

wxwax

I'm still playing with, and trying to learn the most effective way to use, Shadow Highlight in the Photoshop Adjustment menu.

I find that the default settings, especially for highlights in direct light (what Shay likes to call "Harsh" light, tho he should know better) often look artificial. So I play with old photos that have been shot in direct sunlight, and build up my confidence at making adjustments with the tool.

I'll post images from the same scene, treated differently.

This first image was treated today. It got Shadow Highlights, a duplicate layer in Overlay, some Curves, Levels, Saturation and Sharpening and a warming Photo Filter.

wxwax

Here's the second image. Same scene, treated about a year ago when i first made the shot and never dared touch Shadow Highlight.

As you can see, I struggled with the direct light, and the final result looks too contrasty to my eye.

wxwax

Now, it may well be that you look at both shots and say that neither works.

If you feel that way, what exactly do you think is not working, and what might you change?

Jeanne Marie

I think you're right on the money. I've been messing with Shadow/Highlight recently myself and I'm getting to find it's pretty useful.

I needed to increase contrast in a particular image and that's actually what I started tweaking Shad/High to bring out. I usually use levels and curves, but thought I’d play around a bit. See if I could learn something new.

Your image works much better with the lower contrast. It enhances the topic and mood of the shot.
Now I'm going to have to try it your way.

DavidTO

For those who want to catch up to wxwax on this, but don't really know anything at all about shadow/highlight, you can check out our tutorials here and here.

Also, because of the way that the colorspaces are designed, shadow recovery is often best handled in LAB mode, and highlights recovery in RGB.

Seefutlung

I like the contrasty shot. (At least on my monitor.) The fisherman pops out from the background ... the water looks colder (less benign) ... the clothing looks crisper, the fish looks larger (heck, can't even see the fish in the less-contrasty shot).

wxwax

That's because there isn't one. Everything you cite on the contrasty one is what I was going for: I did some vignetting, and really wanted the water to pop. But overall, I didn't like how the fisherman looked.

wxwax

DavidTO wrote:

11]here[/url].

Also, because of the way that the colorspaces are designed, shadow recovery is often best handled in LAB mode, and highlights recovery in RGB.

Interesting.

jfriend

Can we see the ooriginals?

wxwax wrote:

Now, it may well be that you look at both shots and say that neither works.

If you feel that way, what exactly do you think is not working, and what might you change?

Care to share the originals so we can offer some ideas on how we'd treat the harsh sunlight? I use shadow/highlights a lot in sunlit scenes. In fact, my number one request for an enhancement to ACR is to add shadow/highlights to the RAW editor so I can do it non-desctructively and efficiently apply it to lots of photos.

I use a shadow adjustment to restore some visible detail in the shadows. I first play with the amount slider, then with the tonal range slider and I try to keep the effect away from the mid-tones (because it flattens them) by pushing the tonal range slider as far over as I can and still see a desired effect in the shadows.

I use a highlight adjustment if there are bright tones that are so bright that you can't see much detail even if the detail isn't actually blown. Again, I start with the amount slider, then try to narrow the effect to as small a tonal range as I can to still see the benefit where I want it.

Then, I typically find I need more mid-range contrast which I try to add with an S-curve. The goal here is to steepen the curve in the mid-range area. Depending on the image, that might work with a pure s-curve or I might have to use only half an s-curve if I can't afford to drop the dark tones anymore or I can't afford to raise the rights anymore. Sometimes, the shadow/highlights has given me just enough room for the s-curve.

And, sometimes, I find that I want the s-curve for the mid-tones, but I have to coarsely mask it off in a bright area or a dark area to keep from losing detail there.

I you link in your originals, I'll have a go to see how I'd treat them.

DavidTO

wxwax wrote:

Interesting.

I should have said on the L channel in LAB. No sense running it on the channels that don't contain any shadow information.

wxwax

jfriend wrote:

I you link in your originals, I'll have a go to see how I'd treat them.

Sure, but I can't do it until this evening.

ratcheer

DavidTO wrote:

For those who want to catch up to wxwax on this, but don't really know anything at all about shadow/highlight, you can check out our tutorials here and here.

Also, because of the way that the colorspaces are designed, shadow recovery is often best handled in LAB mode, and highlights recovery in RGB.

Thanks for the links. I guess I know what I'll be doing, this evening.

Tim

Jeanne Marie

DavidTO wrote:

Also, because of the way that the colorspaces are designed, shadow recovery is often best handled in LAB mode, and highlights recovery in RGB.

Is there any danger in switching between modes like there is in going back and fourth between CMYK and RGB? I understand that to be a huge no no, but honestly don't know too much about LAB.

pathfinder

You can switch from LAB to RGB without concern -

Dan Marguiis has a long dscussion of this topic in his book Photoshop LAB Color - The Canyon Conundrum. (Going from RGB or LAB to CMYK loses some colors, because CMYK is a color space dedicated to printers and inks, which generally have smaller color spaces ( also CMYK may have better yellows ))

There are folks who will argue otherwise, but Dan has convinced a lot of folks of his accuracy about going from RGB to LAB and back.

wxwax

OK kids, here are the pics converted from RAW, essentially untouched.

Click on the pic to get the original size for download.

jfriend

A retouch workflow

wxwax wrote:

OK kids, here are the pics converted from RAW, essentially untouched.

Neat pictures by the way. They seem very sharp.

I'm not sure what level feedback you're interested in so I'll just go through my thought process.

When I look at the first photo, I see two things that you might want to accomplish with shadow/highlights. First, there are some shadows on the fisherman that are a bit dark and make it hard to see some detail (shadow from the hat and shadow from the arms and vest). Second, there are some pretty bright highlights that are not blown, but are bright enough that you can't easily see detail in them. This is most obvious in the fisherman's waders.

I started by looking at the shadow issues. When I bring up shadow/highlights and play with the shadow adjustment, I find that any shadow adjustment that lightens the shadows on the fisherman also raises the brightness of the water in the background which is an undesirable effect. Upon closer examination with the info palette, we can see that the shadow under the hat is basically exactly the same luminosity value as the water. That means we can't easily use just shadow/highlights to raise the shadows on the fisherman without affecting the water. At this point, there are several possiblities for how to isolate the shadow setting to just the fisherman. It would be possible to do this in LAB mode using a blendif slider because the water is fairly uniquely blue and we could block the effect there with a blendif setting on the B channel. But, parts of the shirt that we want to raise are blue also so that makes it hard to use that technique. This is probably a case where a quick and dirty mask is probably the easiest way.

So, I dup the background layer, apply a shadow adjustment, limiting the tonal width to 30% and then mask out everything except the fisherman's head and body with a very rough mask. The effect is fairly minor, but I think it's an improvement. It doens't so much for the harsh shadow under the hat, but it does add more visible detail in the shaded areas under the arms and hands.

Now, I turn my attention to the highlights. The brightest parts of the image are the hands, the white patches on the shirt and the waders. The hands are pretty borderline bright. The waders don't look blown, but you also can't see much detail in them because they are so bright. So, I merge the previous result to a new layer and apply a highlight adjustment. In this case, I find that an amount of 28% and a tonal width of 17% isolates the adjustment to just the brightest part of the images with no masking required.

Now, I typically experiment with a curve. The waders still don't show as much detail as they could because they lack contrast. The shadow adjustment has also reduced the contrast a bit on the fisherman. Both of these can be addressed with a curve. My goal here is to add steepness to the curve in the area of the waders and the shirt/jeans without losing detail in the darker areas of the image. I do that with a curve that steepens the top quarter of brightness, pulls down the mid-tones, then keeps from darkening the darkest quarter tones.

While playing with this curve, I discover that the fisherman really starts to pop in the image if the background is darkened while not darkening the fisherman. I can't accomplish that with this curve because the same curve that darkens the background also darkens the shadow areas on the fisherman which I don't want to do. So, I finish this curve for contrast with doing the background yet. I noticed that the color has been modified a bit with this curve layer and I decided that I don't want those color changes so I set the curve layer to luminosity blend mode.

I could probably find a way to accomplish the darkening of the background without a mask in LAB mode with blendif settings, but both for the purposes of this explanation and for this image's workflow I decide not to go to LAB mode. That means I'll need to use a quick mask so I can darken the background without affecting the shadows on the fisherman. First, I create a new curves layer. I find out where on the curve the water is and I pull that down to darken it and put points on the curve to not modify the other tones as much as possible. This also influences some of the tones in the fisherman so I quckly mask that out from this curves layer.

Finally, I merge everything to a new layer and add a little sharpening.

This is the result I ended up with which is subtlely different, but I think adds some punch and provides more focus on the fisherman. The main differences are more visible detail on the fisherman in both shadows and waders, and a bit darker background:


Your edit at the start of the thread:


And your original:

rutt

Tuning Shadow/Highlight parameters
Here is something I've learned from beta reading Dan Margulis' Professional Photoshop, 5th edition (due for publication in the fall). Consider it a teaser.

Steps to tune Shadow/Highlight parameters:

1. Set Amount to 100%, Radius to 3%
2. Tune Tonal Width to target the adjustment to the relevant areas of the image
3. Tune Radius to bring out the details in that area
4. Tune Amount to make it look good

Not very different from the steps to tune USM, really.

Now I'll walk though these steps to bring out the highlights in one of Sid's pictures. (Shadows are completely analogous and are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Amount to 100%, Radius to 3%

The dialog looks like this:



and the image looks like this:



Notice that I have the two sliders on the bottom, Color Correction and Midtone Contrast set to 0. If you know anything at all about adding pop to images, the best practice to to set these to 0 and then add adjust contrast and color yourself after the shadow/highlight adjustment.

Tune Tonal Width

With these settings of Amount and Radius, the areas impacted by the adjustment are very obvious. Change the Highlight Tonal Width to 70 and nearly the whole image is darkened:



Set to 6 and almost nothing will be darkened:



Use the Preview checkbox on the right of the dialog box to compare with the original and see the targeted areas.

I settled on a value of 25 for Tonal Range in this image. At this value only the waders and the highlights on the shirt and faces were affected at all:





Tune Radius to Bring Out the Details

This parameter controls the transitions between areas more and less impacted by the adjustment. For those familiar with HIRALOAM sharpening, it's very similar to tuning the Radius in that technique. We want to find a value that best brings out shape in the targeted areas. Too low a value, and the highlights are blurred into a solid (as at the end of the last step). Too high a value, and the the transitions are so sharp that fine shape detail is lost. Here is the image with Radius set to 100:



I found that at Radius = 23, I could see nice shape in the waders:





Tune Amount to Make it Look Good

Now it only remains to decide just how much of a good thing you want. The Amount slider determines the opacity of the adjustment. Set to 0, the adjustment does nothing. Set to 100%, it does as much as it can, which is rarely what you want (unless you plan to use in some sort of a blend in subsequent steps.) This is a matter of personal taste, but I ended up liking 23%:





At this point consider the other half (shadows) of the adjustment to bring out shadow details. The steps are exactly the same. After that, you can add pop and sharpness with your favorite workflow. Most likely you'll want to add some saturation or LAB steepness (not quite the same thing) now that you have better contrast.

Important: If you are starting from a RAW image, make sure you to tune the Exposure and Shadow amounts in ACR to minimize clipping. Checking the Shadow and Highlight checkboxes at the top right of the ACR window will make areas with clipping obvious.

wxwax

Very thorough! Rutt, I really appreciate your taking the time to give such a painstaking tutorial!

This really helps demystify the tool. Thanks.

Stustaff

Very cool Rutt Cheers

Andy

rutt wrote:

Here is something I've learned from beta reading Dan Margulis' Professional Photoshop, 5th edition (due for publication in the fall). Consider it a teaser.

Steps to tune Shadow/Highlight parameters:

1. Set Amount to 100%, Radius to 3%
2. Tune Tonal Width to target the adjustment to the relevant areas of the image
3. Tune Radius to bring out the details in that area
4. Tune Amount to make it look good

Not very different from the steps to tune USM, really.

Now I'll walk though these steps to bring out the highlights in one of Sid's pictures. (Shadows are completely analogous and are left as an exercise for the reader.)

Amount to 100%, Radius to 3%

The dialog looks like this:



and the image looks like this:



Notice that I have the two sliders on the bottom, Color Correction and Midtone Contrast set to 0. If you know anything at all about adding pop to images, the best practice to to set these to 0 and then add adjust contrast and color yourself after the shadow/highlight adjustment.

Tune Tonal Width

With these settings of Amount and Radius, the areas impacted by the adjustment are very obvious. Change the Highlight Tonal Width to 70 and nearly the whole image is darkened:



Set to 6 and almost nothing will be darkened:



Use the Preview checkbox on the right of the dialog box to compare with the original and see the targeted areas.

I settled on a value of 25 for Tonal Range in this image. At this value only the waders and the highlights on the shirt and faces were affected at all:





Tune Radius to Bring Out the Details

This parameter controls the transitions between areas more and less impacted by the adjustment. For those familiar with HIRALOAM sharpening, it's very similar to tuning the Radius in that technique. We want to find a value that best brings out shape in the targeted areas. Too low a value, and the highlights are blurred into a solid (as at the end of the last step). Too high a value, and the the transitions are so sharp that fine shape detail is lost. Here is the image with Radius set to 100:



I found that at Radius = 23, I could see nice shape in the waders:





Tune Amount to Make it Look Good

Now it only remains to decide just how much of a good thing you want. The Amount slider determines the opacity of the adjustment. Set to 0, the adjustment does nothing. Set to 100%, it does as much as it can, which is rarely what you want (unless you plan to use in some sort of a blend in subsequent steps.) This is a matter of personal taste, but I ended up liking 23%:





At this point consider the other half (shadows) of the adjustment to bring out shadow details. The steps are exactly the same. After that, you can add pop and sharpness with your favorite workflow. Most likely you'll want to add some saturation or LAB steepness (not quite the same thing) now that you have better contrast.

Important: If you are starting from a RAW image, make sure you to tune the Exposure and Shadow amounts in ACR to minimize clipping. Checking the Shadow and Highlight checkboxes at the top right of the ACR window will make areas with clipping obvious.

WoW! This is awesome, John

I'm going to ask David to put this on our Tutes section, dgrin.smugmug.com
thanks for offering.

aporia

Thanks for this very helpful step-by-step through the Shadow/Highlights mystery menu, Rutt. I've reset my my parameters to start with these defaults.