It would be good to get some definitive feedback from DxO on this, because clearly it is not entirely obvious how this works and it is not just me who finds the matter somewhat opaque (which is reassuring).
Jul🙂
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Actually, I think the PhotoLab 4 user guide has a pretty straightforward explanation. Although it isn’t explicit beyond all doubt, I feel very confident that it implies exactly what you’ve been supposing - that the Fine Contrast slider and the three selective tone fine contrast sliders all apply adjustments in equal amounts. Here’s the text:
- Fine contrast (DxO FilmPack 5 ELITE Edition installed): The Fine contrast slider brings out or softens medium-sized details, and is gentler in its effects than the Microcontrast, slider, making it appropriate to use with portraits.
-
Advanced settings (DxO FilmPack 5 ELITE Edition installed): The Advanced Settings section offers three additional sliders for Fine contrast that act in a selective manner on the following three light ranges:
- Highlights
- Midtones
- Shadows
Each slider range goes from –100 to +100, with the default value set at 0.
A couple of options: If you still want confirmation from DxO, it’s possible that the right staff member will see this topic and respond - or, you can submit a support request at support.dxo.com.
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Fine contrast is less agresive then microcontrast.
Clearview and microcontrast is in skin and faces showing all dimple’s , cracks ,facial hair much more so those you don’t want to use in portret’s.
So finecontrast is a soft kind of contrast to saturate and ease skin kind colors.
About the other three sliders.
Highlight, midtone and shadow.
Those are usable for two things.
1 if you lower in selective tone highlights to much the white gets mussy grey.
By using the contrast highlight slider and also lower this, the negative contrast is lowering detail in the highlight white which causes to disapear that grey mussy smutching. So best way is if selective tone is -40 before you like it set both on -20 and start from there to fine max detail by pushing selective to -25 and recover detail by pushing highlight contrast back to -15.
This behaviour is also in shadows and midtone.
Lifting shadows which are unrecoverable but you need some from the ground, black, you can use shadows constrast to lose the detailing aka shadownoise in those lifted parts by apply negative contrast.
Thank you Peter for your explanation. I’ll experiment a bit more with these controls today. I do hardly any portrait photography but I find the fine detail useful for adding texture in landscapes.
Jul😊
your welcome Jul,
i don’t do portrait as in premeditated, but if it happens i always find the “skin mode” a good start.
(dxo portrait)
i forgot the “2” of the “things”
What you basicly can control is the detailing in a tone section with the three sliders in advantaged contrast. By balancing tone and contrast combined with clearview, microcontrast, fine contrast you can meander the contrast in your image, placing more where you want and less where you need it.
it’s subtle but noticeable and global over your image in tonesections highlight, midtone and shadow.
Combined with local brushes and there contrastcontrols you can mold the landscape’s in your hands.
I don’t have a example found fast but i suggest you take a image make a few Virtual Copy’s of it when the basic editing is done and start on each with an other aproach.
Say 5.
your normal export kind of editing.
using tone and advanged contrast only
using local controls in all matter controlpoints, brushes, etc.
using the HSL color control and Tonecurve
and finally when you have all tested a combination of all.
(this sounds dumb but it sharpens your skills and prediction of which tool helps you when. )
And because it’s non destructive it doesn’t matter if you layer all tooleffects as a stack.
Use the history and on off switches to do comparison of your work.
It’s fun getting different image’s out one rawfile.
(edit: don’t forget to export them as jpeg for the full rendering of the contrast applies for side by side comaprison.)
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UPDATE: I have run some tests and yes, you guys are right. On several RAW files I tried variations of -100 on fine contrast and +100 on all three of the shadow contrast, mid-tone contrast, and highlight contrast and vice versa. I could see no difference between these files and the unedited RAWs. None whatsoever! I am surprised and a little disappointed.
All this time I thought that Contrast applied global contrast over the whole image, Microcontrast applied a very tiny(between pixels) contrast to the entire image, with the Advanced Contrast sliders varying normal contrast(same as Contrast slider) in their respective areas of influence(shadows, mid-tones and, highlights). Then the Fine Contrast slider provided an extra layer of contrast globally that was somewhere between microcontrast and contrast. This is not the case as the FC slider performs the same duties as the AC siders do, only globally instead of locally.
This arrangement puzzles me as I now see very little use for the FC slider at all. My usual workflow has sometimes included adjustments to the Selective Tone sliders and AC sliders in tandem in order to get the tones and contrast as I like it. Then when I finished with these I would decide whether or not some contrast, microcontrast, or fine contrast should be added or subtracted. I’ve gotten some beautiful edits this way, but imagine my surprise to learn that adjusting the FC slider was only messing up my precise adjustments to the shadow, mid-tone, and highlight sliders.
Using my workflow, I now see little use for the FC slider at all. The only two possible uses that I see are: 1.) if I want to increase or decrease FC globally it saves me from having to adjust all three AC sliders to the exact same point. 2.) If I want one or more of the AC sliders at more than +100 or less than -100, then I could adjust say highlight contrast to -100 and FC to -20, if the value that I needed was -120.
These two scenarios would rarely happen to me so I don’t see needing to use the FC slider but ever so rarely. I guess that will teach me not to read manuals. 
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Thanks. Yes, I should make more use of the virtual copy function. I did try out the advanced highlight slider in combination with the Selective Tone highlights adjustment slider to improve definition in breaking waves and got an idea of what is possible, but I’ll try your other suggestions.
Jul🙂
Microcontrast is blacklevel dot’s.
Fine contrast is shadow contrast dots, less deep black. Less visual.
By plus 100 all sliders of high mid and shadow you basicly counter effect fine contrast
Probably -100 fine contrast and +100 shadow does nearly enough to have no visual effect.
The mid and high contrast is adding or losing detail by dotting shadowdots.
That’s why you can lose artifacts by lowering detail/contrast make the planes more homogene. (note the HSL third slider does more or less the same. Making edge(detail and thus a border between to colors) or soften the difference in color nuances.
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Hi Peter. Thanks for the info. Yes the FC and AC sliders do affect the same type of fine contrast so FC slider simply adds to or subtracts from the effects of the AC sliders. I still see little use for the FC slider. 
I reckon the background/reason for this behaviour can be explained, Mark;
The “Advanced” contrast settings are only available (as you know) if one has a FP-Elite license - So, without this license, the “Fine Contrast” slider provides a gross/broad equivalence. As a result, tho, for users with a FP-Elite license there’s little point using “Fine Contrast” slider, as you suggest.
All the same; this has been a good reminder …
John M
John,
If I’m reading this correctly, this seems to say that the Fine Contrast slider is available in PhotoLab Elite without a FilmPack 5 Elite license. Is that what is being suggested?
From the user guide, “If you have installed DxO FilmPack 5 (ELITE Edition), four other sliders will also be present: Fine contrast and three advanced settings tied to it: Highlights, Midtones and Shadows.”
Mark
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Thanks John for the response, but Mark is right. FC is also part of FP5.
By the way Mark, until reading this thread I was unaware of the relationship between the Fine Contrast slider and the three Advanced Contrast sliders. Thanks go to Peter and your follow up test. This was very useful information.
Mark.
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Ahh - My incorrect assumption !
Indeed, yes … a worthwhile “learning”.
John M
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I know I sure learned a lot! Thanks to Peter and Greg for the correct information, I just tested it. Thanks to Jul for asking the question.
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It’s like all other nuance edite sliders.
you need to know and understand there purpose to use them at the right time.
DxO stil needs some extra sliders in this part of toning.
there are workarounds but for more open communication and easy acces they are needed.
(i need to test more and make some good explainations first before i can show them here as new asked feature and the release of v4 is just so why leap over that?)
ok now the contrast /tone controls.
contrast is always about adding (plus) or losing detail/saturation. at any level.
- microcontrast is about edgedetection and dragging lineparts to black getting the effect of more hars lines and more saturated colors (deeper colorlook by adding black dots)
its a form of USM unsharpmasking but more detailed/finer dots.
Fine contrast does the same but with grey dots so lines, in your skin for example, don’t be sharpend (blacklined like woman’s eyeliner) as much and you can “saturate”/detail colors more subtle. so softtone , pasteltints are benefit from Finecontrast.
in tone you have blacks to drag the tonecurve down to “o” but it’s not the same as “blacklevel”
Because “blacklevel” is about ADDING blackdots without having the sharpening effect that Microcontrast has.
Clearviewplus has some blacklevel because it’s trying to avoid sharpening on part’s that can’t have it. (that’s the “plus” i think) the algorithm is searching for edges to sharpen and add’s blacklevel dots “random” to dehaze the picture. Clearview/clarity is about saturating colors and enhancing detail wile “blacklevel dots” only “saturate/enhancing” color.
so reminder that selective tone is about lumination, you bent the tonecurve but don’t create detail by changing.levels. you just get them “visible”.
the (advanged") contrast is about adding “dots” or lowering “dots” more to blackisch level in order to create something, namely enhancing edges/lines/smal details. in the tone curve you not only bent the toencurve you add “blackdots” to the imagedata.
creating “noise” black noise.
Using the tone curve and making a S-form you bent as in the seletive tone tool the image toning so saturating colors BUT you DON’T add sharpening kind of dots.
we have this shown in the clearview / tonecurve combination tutorial.
So use all together and you will be more happy with the results
Peter
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Thank you Peter for the education on digital contrast. I always thought that raising contrast was just raising lighter values and lowering darker values and opposite for lowering contrast, same as increasing or decreasing paper grades in darkroom printing. All my years of analog photography did not properly prepare me for the digital revolution and how contrast on digital files works. I learn something new every day and that makes life a lot more fun!
i made a rather quick and dirty video to show you the difference effects:
click here
The tone curve create’s “contrast” by saturation of the image toning but not real sharpening as clearview does.
i tried to show this here video
different application.
there clarity is as DxO’s Clearviewplus.
blacklevel is as a blunt Dehaze slider.
what it shows is the difference between microcontrast and contrast.
tonecurve has a great viewtool of what contrast does in the tonecurve and what “clearview/clarity” does. much less to the curve but more to “sharpening”
hope this helps.
Peter
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Thanks Peter for taking the time to produce these videos. Very helpful!
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Always have been wondering what ‘Fine Contrast’ and the Advanced Settings are really doing, as I didn’t know that from (old) PS / ACR / LR. – And yes, I read the manual and ?-help.
Finally I understood, that Highlights / Midtones / Shadows are just a subset ‘controlled’ by the master AND don’t change the saturation – different to Contrast or Tone Curve (did some experimentation).
Thank you for all questions & explanations.
Wolfgang