These areas can't be shown or printed as they were originally seen.ĭark areas with little or no detail are of less concern. A print or most monitors can't display the full range of colors that a raw or even. The indicator shouldn't become gray where all three channels are clipped. In general I don't mind a little clipping of one color. Sometimes you have to zoom in on the right area at 100% to see the clipping. The advantage of these sliders is that they can be used to expand and compress image detail in various different parts of the tonal range. If you start from a less than well exposed ETTR image RAW file then yes using any of the sliders to push parts of the image above their starting points, you will be revealing additional noise in the image. Since nothing has been pushed, there is no additional noise revealed by doing this. As far as the image data is concerned, it hasn't been brightnd, the higher tones have been pulled. What is important is that where possible I try to expose so that once all the processing is done most of that shadow to midtone that is effectivly pulled up, by having the Shadows slider set at +100 is actually only at the values it was before I started processing. Sometimes I even need to use local brush adjustments to get everything balanced the way I like it. Once I have done them all I then go back and fine tune the image. Finally I will pull out the black and white points so that they are just off of lighting the clipping warnings. I then set the midtones with the exposure slider. In pretty much all of those images the first thing I will do is set Highlights to -100 and Shadows to +100.

I also process in LR (4.4 but it is still PV 2012).

I also often shoot subjects with very high DRs, aircraft against the sky, and want details in both the shadows and the higher midtones. I always shoot ETTR, so need to bring down the exposure. I just mentioned this in a post to one of your other threads.

Recovering highlights using darktable