So I've been using the beta version for the past week or so, and had been really enjoying the new developing setup and tools and the 2012 processing... however today I was shooting in the studio and doing some seamless white shots, and using the same setup with lighting placement/power and camera settings, etc. as usual... and my blinking highlights were turned on on my lcd as usual... and everything is good to go. In camera exposure is correct on subject, I'm blowing out the background and floor the way I want... no issues.
THEN I get home and import the images into LR4 and all the white that should be and was blown out, has now been retained, or culled back so only small parts are blown to white instead of all that I wanted. And now in order to get them to blow out properly I have to take the white slider all the way up to 100%, which in turn messes with the exposure on my model.
I'm really frustrated! I mean, awesome for adobe for being able to reign in the highlights in an image, but it messes up my seamless white workflow! When I bring these images back into LR3.5, the blown out areas are where they should be and how they were when I shot them. Not sure how I'm going to do seamless white with LR4 now.
The Adobe team made tweaks to the Whites and Highlights sliders for the production version. I think you will find it works better now than in the beta. You can download the trial and give that a shot if you are not sure about purchasing.
Adjusting the highlight end-point of the tone curve should also be effective in blowing out a white background.
Eyeball wrote:
The Adobe team made tweaks to the Whites and Highlights sliders for the production version. I think you will find it works better now than in the beta. You can download the trial and give that a shot if you are not sure about purchasing.
Adjusting the highlight end-point of the tone curve should also be effective in blowing out a white background.
I am using the production version. =/
I guess I just need to experiment with it a little bit more.
What you are seeing jives with one of the new "features" in LR4. If I read it correctly, it sounds like they have designed the 2012 process to include some hightlight recovery, but without a way to turn it off. In most cases this would be helpful, but your situation is one where it is not.
Lance Lee wrote:
What you are seeing jives with one of the new "features" in LR4. If I read it correctly, it sounds like they have designed the 2012 process to include some hightlight recovery, but without a way to turn it off. In most cases this would be helpful, but your situation is one where it is not.
Agreed! I mean it I think it is awesome that the program is able to recover and reign in blown highlights like that, but def not good in situations like this. Especially when I shoot seamless white about every other day. I guess for now, I'll have to use the old processing for that work. Just seems like a real pain to have to keep switching. =/
If anybody has any advice or suggestions, I'm all for it.
In camera and in LR 3.5 my highlights are completely blown how I want them. But then in LR 4, they automatically get retained. The retention of them in this image isn't as severe as some others I had. I had a few where it kept all of them in check from blowing out, even thought they were blown in 3.5.
There is no doubt that the defaults have changed between the process versions (that's why they are separate process versions) but it still seems to me that you should be able to blow out the background without too much trouble. Did you try moving the end-point of the tone curve?
Eyeball wrote:
There is no doubt that the defaults have changed between the process versions (that's why they are separate process versions) but it still seems to me that you should be able to blow out the background without too much trouble. Did you try moving the end-point of the tone curve?
Yes, I can do that. But that doesn't fix the problem, that only makes things worse. When doing that kind of curves adjustment, it is applied globally, so the whole image gets the adjustment, therefore causing the subject to become over exposed (and particularly in this image her shirt to become blown out, which it isn't in the LR 3.5 version. Nor do I want it to be).
tomrock wrote:
What happens when you switch to the older process version?
It's fine with the older process version. But if I'm going to have to switch process versions every time then it's kinda pointless for me to be running LR 4.
- my white background always has a color tint - it's the material, I use a brush with the exposure raised a stop in auto-mask mode to clean things up. This works great in v4.
Jason -
One additional thought I had was that you might want to try different camera profiles in LR4 and see if some react better to this type of treatment than others. You could also try creating your own custom profile in the DNG Profile Editor with the tone curve in the profile tweaked - kind of a pain but you would only need to do it once.
