Although “Exposure compenstaion” and “DxO Smart Lighting” produce good results in high tonal range scenes (bright lights / very dark shadows), it would be useful if “Selective tones” worked better. I have the impression that the Highlights, Shadows and Blacks sliders don’t produce as good effects as the competition. Just compare it with Lightroom - now it’s its only advantage.
On a raw file ?
Yes, it’s about processing RAW files. It’s not that this function works badly, but I have the impression that particularly strong light and shadow manipulations with the “Selective tone” tool gives not very natural-looking effects. Adjusting the lights and shadows in Lighroom works much more naturally.
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I also think that the Selective Tone slider gives less good results than Lightroom.
Here DxO should make improvements or adjustments.
Especially with skin tones, with strong lightening of shadows or the lowering of highlights.
I like the results in Lightroom much better.
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Hi @nemo & @Al99 - - You may find this post relevant: Shadows and highlights sliders don’t work as expected
Regards, John M
Hi to All!
There is also another thread here that discusses this request in more detail. If You are unfamiliar with the “Selective tone” feature it is well worth the read. 
I think I can handle shadow and highlights sliders pretty well. And I’m happy with the results. That doesn’t change the fact that the manual adjustment of lights and deep shadows in DxO requires much more work than in Lr to get similarly good results. Lr still achieves better (and much easier to achieve) results when it comes to natural-looking highlights and shadows recovery. This does not change the fact that I like the images generated by DxO PL more than from Lightroom.
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I’ve added a post that might shed some clarity on the issues discussed in this post. See https://forum.dxo.com/t/understanding-selective-tone-control/9916
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Meanwhile I have developed quite some pictures using both Photolab and Lightroom and highlight / shadow recovery is still a problem. Even if I invest quite some time, Photolab cannot produce the results I can achieve using Lightroom 6.14 pretty easy and fast. Photolab generates ugly colour artifacts in situations where Lightroom delivers natural looking results without any strange side effects.
And even if some users keep on stressing “take your photo the right way, then you don’t need highlight recovery” etc or suggest tedious workarounds - no, thanks. This topic has been discussed endlessly (Highlight recovery) and I would really love to see a major improvement on this.
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