![]() ![]() Because at 3200 ISO, most cameras have barely 8 EV of dynamic range remaining. And that depends on your scene, camera, ISO setting, etc. Meaning your "physical" highlights can actually range from 12.5 % to 50 %, up to 100 %. Meaning the actual mid-grey can be as low as 4 % luminance. Now, with 14-EV cameras, 100 % luminance can be direct sun-light, but since everything above is still clipped, you exposed to the right and recover shadows later in software. All in all, you exposed for mid-tones, got your grey at roughly 18 %, and there was not much variability in pictures, so you could just decide that highlights were above 50 % luminance, and shadows below 0.8 %, and that was about it. So, everything below 0.4 % luminance was assumed black. So, middle-grey was at 18 %, and, with older cameras and color-film, black was at -8 EV from diffuse white. The whole ICC color-management chain was built assuming 100 % luminance was diffuse white, and everything above was clipped. Now, having more than 14 EV of dynamic range at 100 ISO is standard, and it's HDR already, since JPEG and most displays have only 8 EV available. The point is not to achieve higher dynamic range than the camera offers (that's not possible), but take full advantage of what the camera has in its guts. When a photographer wants to achieve a higher dynamic range than his camera allows, the only way is to shoot raw and work on it in an image processing software. More controls, but the same use principles apply, and nobody will decide for you how large the highlights range is. You will have whites, highlights, mid-tones, shadows, deep-shadows, blacks and deep blacks instead. Having a tone equalizer is not much more complicated than a simple shadow/highlights. In these setups, "highlights" can have very different meanings. The ICC workflow is not well-suited for HDR work, and we have to think of future-proof workflows that can use ICC but don't rely on it. So, that sums up to a very simple design dilemma: do we want a fixed tool, simple but limited in use because of all the underlying assumptions it makes without telling you, or an all-purpose tool, adaptable but with more parameters ? If you work in HDR scenes, you are screwed, because that doesn't fall into the "correct" use-case they designed for you, on the assumption you will work on camera raws in an ICC workflow. Problem: these meanings assume you work in clipped display-referred RGB space, in an ICC workflow. They have decided for you what "shadows" and "highlights" mean in terms of luminance values. Lightroom and Capture One have users trapped in their engineering decisions. I will never understand why users go on the raw path to take control on the pictures, while just wanting simple basic modules that just work. At the end of the day most users use several basic modules and we need to make sure they are the best possible.
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