I’m a few months late, but just now at the tail end of an effort to go all-in on PhotoLab 5. The things I thought would be issues, like metadata/keywords, I’ve figured out how to either do well or made peace with it. I thought I’d really miss LrC’s local adjustments, and I do kind of miss the radial tool, but U-point is pretty spiffy with PL5.
This topic though has been the unexpected showstopper, totally from a speed perspective. The goal with what I do isn’t the editing itself but the end product, so I like to spend my limited time taking and enjoying the photos, not editing. Yet a lot of the posts above seem to accept to get similar output is going to take more time and effort here. I can make a quick pass in LrC on a contrasty or harshly-lit photo, if I at least did a half-way decent job at capture, in maybe 10 seconds. Pull down one slider a bit, push up another, maybe a minor white point tweak, off I go to the next. (My standard personal preset also includes a very slight S-curve adjustment, so I’m rarely adding contrast)
What I keep running in to here is having to stop at Smart Lighting, try a couple levels of that, rack the slider around, see if spot weighting helps. If not, +/- 20 or so in tone sliders has a pleasing enough output, but beyond that it makes things flat. So, if those things aren’t enough, it’s on to monkeying with the tiny tone curve. In desperation, maybe some local adjustments.
I’ve got to think there’s a middle ground solution to be had?
Or if I’m just missing how to quickly and easily get a comparable result, I’d love to have just missed something. I can’t help but notice though, after watching probably 6-8 hours of YouTube videos by guys like PhotoJoseph that this sort of image/scenario is avoided, which makes me think it’s just a true weakness with no good workaround. Plenty of videos about colors and local adjustments, but even a recent one about tone, if I remember, showed pulling up shadows a bit but no images of, say, golden hour where something is a bit overexposed and needs to be pulled down and where another part of the image in shadow needs to be pulled up. Just a couple dark pictures of models.