Behaviour of black and white v shadow and highlight sliders

[Jan-Peter Onstwedder]

First of all congratulations on a very impressive app! I’m trying to see if it can replace Capture One for me. One difference and an area where I feel C1 is a bit more sophisticated is the behaviour of the white and black sliders v shadows and highlights. In C1, moving black slider moves the left side of the histogram away from the 0 point, but around the median or two-thirds mark (so 125-160 range) the histogram doesn’t move further, so it gets compressed. The shadow slider moves the left side of the histogram to the right, with much less or very little compression. White and highlight sliders to the opposite. These affect mostly the 0 – 15th percentile (guesstimates). The advantage is that with black and white sliders you can accurately reduce the dynamic range (especially useful for editing for printing) without the relatively crude use of the levels tool. Shadows and highlights are useful for the 15-30th percentile and then brightness is really about the central part.

In Nitro I haven’t worked out yet how to manipulate the histogram in a similar targeted fashion. In fact, it seems the black slider in Nitro is more like the shadows in C1, and shadows in Nitro more like blacks in C1.

Am I missing something in Nitro? Misunderstanding how the sliders affect the histogram?

[Joachim Jundt]

The histogram can also be manipulated if you scroll down the tool list. In German, it’s “Tonwerte”, maybe in English it’s Tonality or Tone. You’ll find it underneath “RAW Tuning and you first need to check the checkbox. I also try to replace C1, but lately I missed the repair brush and didn’t find anything in Nitro to remove some sensor dust particles.

[Joachim Jundt]

I tried to edit my last post with

And I feel there’s a bit too much sliders: Highlights and Reproduce (Wiederherstellen) and White, Shadows and Blacks and Amplify Shadows and Improve Depths. I don’t find it always clear what to do with which slider and which to prefer over the other in which special image.

but somehow “submit” didn’t submit, even after refreshing the page.

[Jan-Peter Onstwedder]

I agree with that – it’s sometimes difficult to work out which tool to use to achieve a particular effect. Tools like C1 are very mature and Nitro is still evolving so I don’t mind that there are things like dust removal, red eye removal etc, that are missing. I also don’t need those very often. At the current rate of development I would guess Nitro could replace C1 for me in another 2-3 versions.

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