I’m just working through some images from a holiday. The images were taken in mountains with quite a lot of haze. The difference that just Clear View (and sometimes Smart Lighting makes) is amazing - applied to a raw image with the camera matching profile also applied. This is a before and after. I really like the way that the mountains in the distance become visible. My question - does the image look overprocessed. I submit images to an online stock library. They do not care very much about the subject matter but certain basics, exposure, focus and overprocessing matter. Does anyone have any
Hi Justin. I agree with you CVP can really add something to certain landscapes and other non-people shots. Please don’ t ever use CVP on human skin(it produces weird skin-tones that are very unnatural) . I use it to good effect on non-human skin shots at level 20-30 instead of the garish default value of 50. It can cause haloing around objects projecting into the sky(if the level is set too high).
You will read the postings of some well-respected members here that will tell you “Never use CVP”. This is just their opinion which doesn’t agree with our opinion…Use it and enjoy!
If you think it looks a little over processed, (and I agree), just lower the amount you applied a bit. Also check the amount of sharpness and contrast you may have added with other tools. New users of ClearView Plus do tend to over apply it in my experience.
I find the default value for CVP is too much and always reduce it. I mostly use it with Control Lines to just affect the distant parts of the image or the sky with clouds. Sky with clouds really benefit from CVP. CVP is also useful to add a little local contrast to flat images.
I quickly found the default level of ClearView Plus was waaay too much for my taste. Instead, I found a maximum of around ‘15’ was much better,
However, it wasn’t long before I found the extra fine contrast sliders that become available in PL when you (buy) activate FilmPack a much better alternative to ClearView Plus and these days I rarely use it.
mother nature doesn’t make clouds with cutting sharp edge and insane details. every tools has their own perks, use at you discretion, if you think it’s too much than it might be. remember when HDR came out? now what are your thoughts a decade later when you look at them?
Hi @stuck - thanks. Do these extra sliders become available in the Selective Toning area? I wonder if I would get similar results with ColorEfEx Dynamic Contrast?
The Fine Contrast slider which appears just above the Advanced Settings is also added by FilmPack. I am not certain whether or not your response may have confused @justinwyllie
By the way the three Highlights, Midtones and Shadows sliders are actually subsets of the Fine Contrast slider. As a general rule you would use the main Fine Contrast slider by itself or select one or more of the three Advanced sliders. Using the both the Fine Contrast slider and the advanced sliders at the same time will generally add more than desirable amounts of fine contrast and the results may be unpredictable.
It is a wonderful tool to boost contrast in many landscape scenes where haze is an issue, but it is also easy to overdo the enhancement.
By default for images I apply maybe +5 to +10 overall, and then I only add more using local adjustment (mainly Luminosity mask) on things like mountains and sky with clouds.
I recommend use CV sparingly. For the image in question, it’s very seldom that visibility is 100% in such a landscape. There’s almost always some sort of haze in the distance. For more realistic results, I’d try not to remove all that haze with CV.
In order to enhance detail and feel of “life” in colors it’s best to build in bricks the wall not one slap.
Small amount of clearviewplus 5-25% often only on the hazy background not the forground by using local adjustments controlline
Bit of colorsaturation, which is in fact a kind of micro/fine contrast.
Bit of tonecurve blacklevel adjustment.
Some contrast sliders…
And then after your done turn off and on the tools activation slider to see it’s effect on your editted photo.
If turning off improves the image adjust the amount of even keep it turned off.
If turning on and off don’t give any visible effect why would you keep it turned on?
Colors and contrast are often , atleast i do, pushed to far in the first attempt because you see “change” and change triggers the yess it works.
Next day the image looks overcooked.
Bummer re-edit and re-export.
I want to add the why.
Base problem is a camera “sees” the frame and capture that as rawfile wile our brain does highres stacking: It captures multiple images in different focallengths and exposure values and stack that to one HDR HQ image which we think as wat we see.
Our brain adds colors, enhances forms and figurs we know from before how they look. (flying birds looks by naked eye detailed and sharp wile your zoomlens produces a faint image. )
So haze and other things we see on one single image are there only our brain did processed that out by stacking detailed images to form a mental picture.
So in post we try to get the same image as we would see in our brain with one image. which is quite possible because the rawfile contains a lot of hidden information but you need to massage this out the dark corners so to speak.
If we want a perfect replication of what we experienced on a scenery point we need to shoot multiple images in different focal and focuspoints and exposure values in several directions and and stitch and stack this at home.
But we don’t so we relay on the power of the dxo pl’s editing tools.
This is where the four Fine Contrast sliders come in so useful. It is astounding what a difference they can make when judiciously applied.
Only when they are not sufficient would I then move on to Micro-contrast, but preferably using an LA and, finally, if all else fails CVP, again on an LA.
Here is an example of what a difference those sliders can make without invoking haloed edges, or grain in smooth areas.
This image has been printed to A2 (24" x 17") and hangs in my living room, where I can look at it close up and still not see any artefacts - just pure beautiful tones of grey, clearly separated where necessary
@Joanna plain microcontrast is one type of dots evenly spread around the field wile CVP is using a slightly more advanged technique.
It used different black dots in size and blacknes, a combination of microcontrast and fine contrast grouping around edges and spreading in colorplains.
So best is if you need to add microcontrast use a form of clearview local or global. And leave the microcontrast amount to the optical module.
Last thing i thought off wile repairing a printer.,
Heuey lunchbreak!
In regard of landscape photography : Dxopl can only add new things in the algorithm of deepprime XD which try’s to render in details which are lost in the shadows. In any other case what isn’t in the rawfile can’t be made visible wile human eye’s and our brain are using our memory pictures to fill in the blanks.
Dxo’s optical module is setting microcontrast to a certain level so the sharpnes which would be possible as resolvingpower by using the lens is pulled out the rawfile.
If you add extra microcontrast you often overpush the image and skin is the first what shows this.
By using the larger dots and less “zeroblacklevel” of finecontrast you can provoke the softened details to come out of the background without halo’s and clustered black spots which CVP can render in if it’s used in stronger amount’s. This clustered dots is how HDR algoritms Exaggerate the edges of plains so it look 3D isch.
But for dehazing and pop out colors (forgot the name at this moment edit it’s called “clarity”) clearviewplus can be used very well as fundation for the bricks but push it too far and it grows unreal and ugly.
Edit/addision:
Dehaze is like rubbing off the cement slurry of a tile which is left behind when you have rubbed in the grout.
Clarity is like polishing a natural stone tile with a “hardwax” to bring out the colors and contrast details of that stone.
When i tested dxo clearview plus slider and Silypix’s dehaze and clarity and blacklevel sliders against each other it showed that clearviewplus behaves inbetween de dehaze slider and the clarity slider of silkypix. It try’s to do both. That’s why it’s result can be different on different images in the same strenght.
Silkypix blacklevel slider can be best mimic by the use of tonecurve in dxo.
Pull down the low bit of the line a bit down which act like your polaroidglasses…
(Back to work i am on the next spot for repairing a printer. )
CVP can spoil things like human faces (with very rare exceptions), bokeh, and color fidelity,
so generally it’s not good for portraits, macro, reproduction. There was a request here to provide CVP negative values, e.g. for portraits or to get specific mood .
For the type of landscapes like in OP, I’m usually happy with the default CVP=50 setting, unless halos are too prominent, or colors start to look really artificial.
In few cases I had to lower slightly HSL.Luminance and HSL.Saturation in greens and perhaps part of yellows for young grass or leaves. “Good” CVP setting might also depend on the rendering used. Beware, that in some cases CVP interacts quite heavily with WB and SmartLighting settings. Sometimes raising ‘Protect Saturated Colors’ helps.
BTW, who cares about landscape color fidelity on library stocks – 90% of those photos are so heavily overprocessed, as if the target were children or specific type of critics.
For city shots I mostly use CVP=25, 10, or 0, depending on topic and outcome.
I try to stay open and don’t disregard CVP, like some do – it’s just another tool to learn.
Knives can hurt, but you still use them, don’t you?
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