HOW IT WORKS ADJUSTING tones

Use Capture NX-D’s Tone (Detail) panel to selectively adjust shadows

01 HIGHLIGHT EXPOSURE When shooting our scene we attempted to set the aperture and shutter speed to capture detail in our landscape’s brightest areas. However, a little highlight detail has been hidden in the unprocessed start image. Fortunately, as we’re working with a RAW file

we can claw back some of the hidden details. 02 UNDER-EXPOSED-SHADOWS By metering to capture the sky’s highlight detail we’ve plunged much of the landscape below into darkness, losing texture, colour and detail in the unprocessed RAW file’s under-exposed shadows. Fortunately, this detail is only hidden, not lost. 03 TONE PANEL Click here to access the Tone panel. This panel enables you to use the Brightness slider to adjust the RAW file’s overall exposure. However, if you try to use the Brightness slider to lighten up the under-exposed shadows, you’ll also blow out the correctly exposed highlights. And if you attempt to restore missing highlight detail with this slider, you’ll plunge the shot’s under-exposed shadows into darkness. The Tone panel also has a Contrast slider that makes whites whiter and blacks blacker. However, these global tone adjusting sliders can’t help us make the selective tonal adjustments that our source image requires. That said, the Saturation slider comes in handy after you brighten up a landscape’s under-exposed shadows, as the colours in these darker areas can look a little drab. 04 TONE DETAIL This panel enables you to make selective tonal adjustments, so you can restore missing shadow detail without blowing out correctly exposed highlights (or vice versa). 05 HIGHLIGHT PROTEC TION This slider enables you to claw back missing highlight detail without altering the exposure of the shot’s shadows. Here a value of 32 has gently darkened the brightest highlights so that they are less blown out. This helps reveal more detail, colour and texture in the clouds. 06 SHADOW PROTEC TION This slider lightens under-exposed shadows to reveal hidden tones, without messing with the correctly-exposed highlights. Here a value of 44 is enough to reveal more texture and detail in the darkest parts of the heather. 07 D-LIGHTING HS This slider can be effective at lightening up under-exposed shadows, though the contrast in the adjusted areas can look flat. We’ve used a low setting to complement the results from the Shadow and Highlight Protection sliders. 08 MULTI PREVIEW Click here and pick Compare Before and After Images from the pop-up menu. This helps you see the differences between your unprocessed RAW ‘negative’ and the ‘developed’ version.