PhotoLab 'Highlight Adjustment'

Hallo all.

I've just acquired a K10D, and am into the joys of serious digital manipulation of images for the first time.

I save all my shots as .dng, and use PhotoLab to get the best out of them before saving as 16bit .tif, which form the source for further editing for whatever purpose thereafter.

I've found PhotoLab easy to get the hang of (despite the hopeless help files) with one exception: I cannot for the life of me understand what 'Highlight Adjustment' does - I can see no difference in preview images, or the histogram, wherever the sliders are set.

I'm using v3.12.

Can anyone enlighten me, please?

With thanks.

[EDIT: Matt's reply is more relevant than mine, and I have not picked a good example image]

For certain subjects, there can be an effect - that is visible on the Preview. It helps to Enlarge Area to see it.

Highlight Adjustment can reduce intensity and increase colour saturation of extreme highlights. It can't restore detail from a blown highlight [blown at time of exposure in camera], but it can make it look less bright and white. Try picking a blown highlight and setting the Preserve Color slider all the way to the left.

Pentax Photo lab has limited power and its user interface is horrible, I think. It is based on Silkypix's "engine", but the proper Silkypix Developer Studio is much better; looks nothing like Lab. Its Highlight Controller is also subtle, but is a little more powerful. All the other controls are superior, too, and there are more controls, and a good near-full-screen preview. Well worth the £75.

100% crops

LEFT: Lab - Default
RIGHT: Lab - Default except: Highlight adjustment (Preserve colour max)



Silkypix - Default except: Highlight adjustment (Chroma 0, DR expansion 4)



The above images could be improved further. They are just to demonstrate what the highlight controls can do. (The Silkypix DR setting is higher than I would normally use).

Uncropped - Silkypix - Default + resize to 800x600, USM 40/0.4/0:

The free version of Silkypx is nearly as good as the paid-for one. It lacks a batch-processing facility, but in most other respects is identical.

G

The time-limited free trial is fully featured. The other free version that you can keep on using has many very useful functions missing. You only get the ones marked in blue here:

http://www.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/products/ds3/function/

I see what you mean.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that they have drastically reduced the features of the free version. But it's a long time since I looked. I've been using Silky since version 2, and in the last year they have changed hands and become rather more commercial.

G

I don't know about back in the days of version 2 (as that was before I had discovered Silkypix), but the Free version of 3 was as it was now about a year ago before Shortcut Software had taken over the sales side of the business.

The software is still developed Ichikawa Soft Laboratory.

Just replying to the original question...

The Highlight Adjustment only works if you have exposed to keep the highlights in the first place! In other words, it cannot recover what was blown out in-camera!

It is a two stage process:
1) At capture, you ensure you underexpose enough to preserve the highlights. So the camera histogram will not be clipped (and on the K10D nothing is flashing red)

2) In Photolab/Silkypix, you push the Exposure slider into the + region to bring the main shot "correct", and use the Highlight Adjustment to claw back the highlights.


It works a real treat for weddings
Coupled with Pentax's very conservative flash exposure (which tries not to blow out highlights) and the Silkypix controls I had detail in every part of every shot

Hope that helps!
Matt

No but, as I mentioned above, it can mute the effects of a blown higlight by making it less intense or less white. Part of the chimney in my pic above was blown at the time of exposure.

At the time I posted my reply, I completey forgot about this useage of the Adjustment - which is obviously what it is for! So I could have posted a better and much more dramatic example than the one above. Sorry about that ak825989.

Thanks very much, all of you, for your helpful replies, particularly iceblinker for the photos; you've made the whole thing clear.

After my initial post I did more searching, and found the references to SilkyPix as a standalone application (I only knew the name as the creators of PhotoLab for Pentax) and I downloaded, installed and experimented with the free version. Their help files, though they suffer a bit in translation, do have illustrations, so it started to make sense; iceblinker's images did the rest.

I realise now that the reason I couldn't see any difference in my preview images was that all the highlights I was dealing with were white, viz clouds; because of the extreme showery weather we've had here lately all my pics have brilliantly sunlit cloud margins plus extensive areas in shade or shadow. This is a typical example (a work still in progress):

http://www.windywalls.net/Photo/08/080414-0331a.htm

Re PhotoLab, it is a bit clunky, but it has been a good learning tool for me; I've gone from never having understoood histograms, or adjusted a tone curve, to having made some quite detailed adjustments to achieve the example image from the .dng file, in just a few sessions. And, quite frankly, I would have freaked out if I had had to deal with SilkyPix straightaway. However the experience of PhotoLab has given me a way into SilkyPix (I already know what some of the controls do), so I have the confidence to take on its other complexities, and thus harness its powers.

I shall probably use both in parallel for a bit, and consider buying a full version of SilkyPix when I have mastered the free. My main immediate use for images is to post small-file-size .jpgs to a website, so PhotoLab is good for a routine quick edit to produce a .tif as a source for that.

Thanks again for all your help, it's much appreciated.

I have an aversion to any form of digital manipulation to photographs, other than what I call optimisation (basically, what I can do in the Raw converter).

However, this is a picture where I would make an exception. Expressed in the simplest terms, it needs to be given more light overall, then to have a major increase in contrast, and finally, the building itself needs to be lightened.

This last bit can't be done in most Raw converters but it needs to be done here because this is the only thing stopping this from being really rather a good photograph.

G

Thanks, George, for being complimentary about my photo, it encouraged me to do some more work on it:

http://windywalls.net/Photo/08/080414-0332a.htm

Apart from anything else, the previous version clearly fell between two stools, neither conveying much info about the tower, nor working as a straightforward silhouette.

I can see that buying this new camera is going to set back my photography for months - I'll be so busy editing existing images on the PC I'll have no time to actually go out and take new ones!