More on Highlights and Shadows in Lightroom 4

In my previous post, I've been asked in the comments if Lightroom 4 is worth the update price, and my answer was YES of course. I haven't played with the new Maps and Books features at all, but I've been using the new Highlight & Shadow controls a lot (the first post where I illustrated them is here).

This is also a good example of the highlight protection with Active D-Lighting that I mentioned here. In this situation with a large portion of the frame being dark and in the shade, I underexposed by one stop, used f/11 for sufficient depth of field, and had the camera in Aperture priority (with Active D-Lighting on High, as usual) do the rest. The resulting exposure, when imported into Lightroom and interpreted with the "Camera Neutral v4" profile looks like this:

Original Exposure, ISO200, f/11, 1/15s @ 24mm, polarizer

This doesn't look too charming, I know (it's more of a documentary photo, I always do these when on hikes because I share my tracklogs on EveryTrail and sometimes add pictures to them). It also doesn't look anything like the scene I saw and illustrates the discrepancy between our human vision and what the camera's sensor can see/do quite nicely. The shadows weren't that dark, the rocks weren't that bright.

In Lightroom, I applied what looks like quite extreme settings (see screenshot). Highlights all the way down, Shadows all the way up, Whites all the way down (to salvage the peaking highlights on these rocks; I think that the Whites control is closest to what Recovery did in Lightroom 3), and Blacks almost all the way up again too.

Clarity in Lightroom 4 has much more punch and brings back the detail on the rocks and in the shadows, just were in needed them. This is something that was previously impossible to achieve with Lightroom, and would require some sort of tone-mapping, like using Color Efex' Tonal Contrast or Detail Extractor filters (I wrote about it before in this article).

Because the very strong adjustments left the image a bit dull looking, I increased Vibrance to compensate for the lack of lifeliness.

Other than the adjustments in the Basic panel, I applied a local adjustment (brush) in the dark lower area, dodging it by 0.39 and adding yet more Clarity - it really works miracles in the shadows and lights, bringing back structure and detail. No other adjustments have been made - I didn't even touch the Tone Curve (where I sometimes used a self-defined parametric curve to increase the Darks and Shadows in Lightroom 3 for this kind of scene).

Here's what the final image looks like - a very HDR-like look, created with Lightroom alone, from a single exposure. I have no doubt that the large and clean D700 pixels make it possible to recover so much shadow detail with relatively little noise, but it illustrates the possibilities and the dynamic range that can be captured in a single raw file quite nicely. ;)

Final image with adjustments.

If you look at the little rock in the water just off the center, where the water becomes darker in the shade it might look like some nasty artifact like a halo or something, but it's actually not. The rock is partly submerged and actually much bigger; the part sticking out of the water is a little wet and this makes it look like there's a halo.

You can switch back and forth between the original and the finalized image in the lightbox (click on the photo).