Be careful with the use of the exposure slider. The exposure slider in ACR is like increasing the exposure in the camera: it acts linearly on the data. The brightness slider increases brightness after the gamma curve is applied. The difference is that it is very easy to drive the highlights into saturation with the exposure slider. The brightness slider is more forgiving. Michael's image, where he increased the exposure to +2 has saturated parts of the image in some channels. The two areas where this is most apparent are the bright areas below the eye and the small white tail feathers. Check, for example, the red channel below the eye, and one will see a lack of detail. Bring the images posted here into photoshop and put small selection boxed around these areas and look at the (all 3 colors) histgram. This will show if some data are hitting the limits.
One does not have the tools in ACR to be certain if a small area is getting a channel saturated, so I prefer to be conservative in ACR and do the adjustments in photoshop where I have more tools to check these things.
Similarly, the black slider: It is too easy to clip the lows, so I set blacks to zero in ACR. If any data gets clipped during the raw conversion, information is lost for the rest of processing. In Michael's image, some areas on the back of the wing are clipped to zero in some channels and in some locations, all 3 channels are clipped. Michael, I'm not trying to pick on you, as I like your overall processing, just do not like clipped highs or lows, and I think it is important to point out the dangers of sliders that can clip data.
Roger
Last edited by Roger Clark; 02-26-2012 at 10:27 AM.
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