Contrast Vs. Black

[stevegiovinco]

Hi,

As a fine art photographer using PV 2010, it was suggested by someone I consider an expert (the chair of the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Photography, Steve B. Smith), to reduce the contrast substantially, to about -20, and increase the Black slider several points to 5 or 8, depending on the photograph, naturally.  This proved to work very well for my work.

In PV 2012, does this still stand?  I did some experiments, and it seems to be slightly more complicated with the introduction or purposing of additional sliders.

Does anyone have an thoughts or suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks!  Steve

[madmanchan]

The main difference with Blacks in PV 2012 is that (1) its orientation is now reversed, i.e., dragging to the left (instead of to the right) clips more of the shadows to pure black, and (2) it has two directions now (i.e., both positive and negative values).  If you found Blacks 5 to 8 to work well for your pictures in PV 2003 and 2010, try setting Blacks in PV 2012 to -10 or so as a starting point and tweak from there.

[kwalsh]

Hi Eric,

Is the new blacks slider purely luminance based?  As I recall in earlier PVs it just clipped the RGB channels equally which meant you could get color shifts in darker tones on extreme movements.  I've got the feeling it is more clever now, but I haven't tested extensively.

Ken