Tone mapping - Shadows and blacks

[lupaz]

Hi,

I find it very hard to bring shadows up without flattening the image. The options, new and old, on the tone mapping area all seem to give a Reinhard effect.
It would be great to have the attached controls to level the contrast better than the tools already in place.
The attached was taken from the Photoshop camera raw.

[Juraj]

Well, there's a catch right now..

1) There is new numeric tone curve adjuster in VFB that has Whites/Light/Shadows/Blacks but
2) It doesn't work before ACES OT. It produces nonsense. I mentioned this many times during dailies but I don't think I got any reply on that aspect.
3) It works after it though. But ACES OT cuts dynamic range, so it's like working on 16bit clamped file, not 16bit raw file in PS (.raw file is internally linear and still has all dynamic range access). That isn't such a problem unless you are recovering highlights, which at that point is no longer possible.

[lupaz]

Thanks Juraj. I wasn't aware of the tone curve operator.
I just tried it and it doesn't seem to behave in the same way as in Photoshop.
I recorded a video.
Look at the sky how with photoshop it remains blueish but with Corona the colors shift drastically.
The image in photoshop is just a JPEG (8bit). Maybe that has to do with it?

[Juraj]

2) It doesn't work before ACES OT. It produces nonsense.

;- )

My opinion is that almost no operator works correctly in stack before ACES OT. That is how the stack is supposed to look but imho it's not correct behaving.
Just compare what Contrast (like 3+ value) does before & after ACES OT. You can drag operators around like in PS.

[lupaz]

Hi Juraj,

I recorded the video with Tone Curve above ACES OT, but the results are pretty much the same if I shift it under, or with no ACES at all.
It seems that the Shadows control is affecting color, when it shouldn't, I think.
Photoshop handles this much better, even with an 8 bit image. The VFB should be doing this much better having all that data to work with, regardless ACES OT.
See video below.