alacant wrote:Hi and thanks again
Use the Develop module after AutoDev
Do you really mean that, or do you mean rather '... the AutoDevs.'? The plural confirmation is vitally important, otherwise I'm back to square one with the old AutoDev-wipe-Dev.
If the response is with the 's', I'm home and dry. Here's hoping:)
Cheers
Sorry for the confusion!
I was trying to answer this question;
Question: Without losing detail, can I enhance it in the AutoDev version so that it stands out more?
In conjunction with this exhange;
It's sounds as if you are equating "brighter" with "more detail"?
Yes, I think I am.
I therefore assumed you were asking how you could make the image appear brighter.
So what I meant by the first method was; use AutoDev as normal for the not-so-bright stretch as discussed/demonstrated. Then, to make all pixels and detail brighter
evenly, launch Develop, tell it to stretch the image 'as-is' (e.g. don't
redo stretch), and only add some skyglow. E.g. all this does is add a pedestal value to make all pixels brighter by the same linear value. This keeps the "objective" dynamic range allocation by AutoDev to all detail intact, except that it obviously eats away some global dynamic range (it simply moves the black point) in the service of making everything brighter (e.g. detail suffers equally). The other two solutions similarly accomplish brightening of the image, but only in certain areas of the image (e.g. detail suffers not equally).
To reiterate; you can obviously build on the detail that AutoDev has brought out by using the Contrast, HDR and Sharp modules. These will modify the detail to stand out more depending on the settings used;
Detail exists by the grace of local brightness differences
Making detail stand out is making those differences greater.
Making all detail stand out as best as possible on a global level (e.g. without local manipulation) means allocating the global dynamic range as optimally as possible to make as much as possible stand out. <-- this is what AutoDev was built to do and what Develop fails at in the shadows and highlights.
You can then further make those differences greater (therby making detail more visible) by performing local dynamic range manipulation. <-- this is what Contrast, Sharp, HDR were built to do.
Does this make sense/help?
EDIT: As a sanity check I asked my partner (graphic designer) to describe the two images (one above the other w/o green squares) I posted earlier without being specific about what the difference was. She indeed said that one looked brighter in some areas (your Develop image), but the other showed more detail (my AutoDev image).
(I was actually thinking of adding something like that test image above into StarTools)
