Many other RAW editors have shadows and highlights sliders that are far more targeted than Photolab. e.g. Increasing shadows also impacts the overall image, it should not.
David, this is a common complaint of ex-Lightroom users. Take some time to get used to the PhotoLab method of changing exposure. It’s more organic than a slider which just changes one tiny part of the image. There’s tone curves available, HLS to focus on one specific area of exposure.
DxO could consider adding a Lightroom mode to the tonal sliders. It would make no difference to me, but refugees might like it.
The irony of the ex-Lightroom crowd is that they are unhappy enough with Lightroom to leave it but always wish the new software worked just like Lightroom, which they disliked enough to abandon.
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Well, I’m one of those Lr refugees, migrated to PhotoLab7 and now PL9. While the tonal sliders work differently, I had no problem adapting after few days of experimenting on very different types of photos. Actually I preferred the PL way, maybe because of color preservation, iirc. Note that also Capture One users may have similar problem. In any PL, Lr, or C1 case, moving one slider usually requires some counteraction from another slider.
There’s one more thing to observe here – Selective Tones can change your local contrast. For example, if you use positive Blacks, some quite aggresive “micro/mini-contrast” can be added by PL, thus recovering the deep shadows details better, but at the expense of possible posterization – thing to watch for. In some extereme cases, for deep shadows recovery you may have to use Tone Curve instead. Lr does something similar but much more softly.
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It doesn’t help that so much tutorial content out there is geared towards Lightroom and I imagine people think “a highlight slider is a highlight slider” regardless of which app it sits in.
So when things that looked great in Lightroom look awful in PhotoLab, you’re suddenly left with a sense of either “oh god, I can’t edit photos, I’m rubbish” or “oh god, PhotoLab can’t edit photos, it’s rubbish”.
A Lightroom mode might be interesting to see. Or at least (and to be fair, I’ve not gone looking) an introduction to PhotoLab for Lightroom users so that the differences are noted and the solutions made clear to newcomers.
I usually make the blacks darker by about half the amount by which the shadows are increased.
Pascal
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