What's the difference between adding contrast and simultaneously darkening highlights and brightening shadows in Lightroom?

Question

In Lightroom 4, when editing a RAW file, what's the difference (if any) between the following edits:

A). +30 Contrast

Or

B). -30 Highlights, +30 Shadows.

Do these do the same thing?

Asked by Eric B

Answer

Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. The GIF animation below shows +30 Contrast, +30 Highlights/-30 Shadows, -30 Highlights/-30 Shadows:

The differences between the three are subtle, however there are indeed differences. Contrast increases the spread of tones across the tonal range, so technically speaking, +30 Contrast is more like +30 highlights/-30 Shadows than it is like -30 Highlights/+30 Shadows. However it is dissimilar from both, in that adjusting contrast also affects color saturation as well as tonal range. This improvement to color contrast is evident between the first two frames of the GIF animation...the colors are more washed out in the +30H/-30S frame (most readily visible in the fence.) Adjustments to contrast are also more likely to affect the entire dynamic range (every tone in the image), where as highlight and shadow adjustments are purposely designed to affect a restricted range of tones.

Answered by jrista

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Is it possible for a lens to produce too much contrast?

Question

I came across a complaint that a certain lens produces too much contrast. The lens was described as rendering "cartoonish" contrast when shooting a portrait with diffused light from a window, where other lenses are said to give a soft transition of light. The claim is that the lens eliminates midtones. The argument continues that contrast can be increased in post-production, but, like adding salt to soup, you can't really go back if there's too much.

Now, as I understand it, this isn't the way it works; when a lens is said to produce good contrast, this is about microcontrast and is really more related to resolution than to overall tonal rendering. Poor lens designs can reduce overall contrast by allowing stray light (flare or veiling glare), but that's uniformly a bad thing — it's not a tunable with a sweet spot which can go too far. Contrast in a print (or global contrast in an image file) can certainly be over-done, but that's a totally different thing.

So, is there something to this complaint? Is this really a possible flaw in a lens? Can a lens "eliminate midtones"? Can lenses have too much global contrast — or, too much microcontrast after all?

Answer

You haven't said whether it is film or digital or given any details of lens or camera type/size/brand. Poor quality film (or film stored or used on poor quality conditions) can affect contrast a lot too. In addition many digital cameras automatically apply a sharpening effect as digital sensors are inherently 'blurry', if the settings of the camera have this turned up (which the cheaper ones tend to do) then the resulting image can have that 'cartoony' look due to the excessive sharpening.

Never heard of a lens having that effect though.

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How to cope with high contrast?

Question

Many times (especially around midday), we encounter lighting situations where the contrast of the scene is too high to capture with a camera. What can we do to create a useful picture in such environment, besides completely blowing the highlights or shooting a silhouette?

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_{Here, I went with the sky.}

Answer

As others have stated the main options are fill flash or multi exposure. I thought I'd post this handy example I shot recently where I tried both techniques:

This is the result of using fill flash:

The flash was off camera and to the left, near the ground. I was intentionally trying to get a very dramatic lighting effect, had I used the flash on camera the shadows would be less dramatic and the light more even.

This is the result of two exposures manually merged into one file:

The fill flash shot is more effortlessly natural looking but the multi-exposure (or HDR if you prefer) definitely has more detail and is more striking. It's worth pointing out that whilst I could have done better with the flash I could also have done better with the exposure blending, this is just a quick job to prove a point.

In general the pros and cons of each method are

Fill flash

• + Natural looking
• + Can be done with film
• + Can have movement in the scene
• + Minimal post processing
• - Only works for close subjects
• - You may have to balance the colour of flash with ambient light
• - Can be hard to get even lighting on your subject and avoid shadows
• - Bright backgrounds mean you have to stop down lots or use an ND at you can't use a fast shutter (unless your flash has HSS)

Multi-exposure (HDR)

• + More even lighting, no problems with shadows
• + Striking images
• + Can use any shutter speed
• + Works with all subject, near and far
• - Requires careful post processing to avoid halos, sickening contrast
• - Other photographers will know you used HDR and secretly judge you ;)
• - You can get weird colours in shadows due to secondary reflections.

This last point is worth expanding on. In my example the subject isn't being lit by direct sunlight. So where is the light coming from? Some of it is from other parts of the blue sky (refracting of particles in the upper atmosphere and turning blue), a small amount is bouncing off the clouds (which had almost gone by this point) but a significant amount of it is bouncing off the green grass in front of the subject.

If you boost the shadows too much using HDR, you can get colour shifts, as the shadows by definition aren't lit by direct light, only by light that has already bounced off other surfaces and picked up their colours!

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