Digital Light & Color

While this may be controversial - Adjust is an amalgamate of more complicated transformations with simplified controls - I have a suggestion, not sure how useful.

In Adjust, the Curve tab is a simplified Color Curves transformation, I take it. There is also a similar Brightness Curve transformation, which I see as a subset of Colour Curves.

However, the Brightness Curve has the Advanced mode which uses low pass/high pass separation and blending (Settings/Advanced Mode) which I find very useful for local contrast enhancements - it's quick and effective.

Would something similar to it work in Adjust, I wonder?

p.s. There is another way of LCE followed by sharpening - double/triple Bilateral Sharpen with decreasing blur radius (which could limit undesirable halos). This can be done in BS transformation, but in Adjust sharpen tab is understandably limited to one step.

Adjust is such a 'Swiss Army Knife' transformation, taken to another level from one of my bread and butter favourites - Levels and Color.

Out of curiosity: it looks to me that the Brightness Curve/Advanced Mode uses something similar to Bilateral Sharpen, but allows for tone adjustments on the low-pass portion of the image. Is that vaguely correct?

I just read the Help file which explains it well - sorry for the question.

Unrelated observation, but related to Adjust: in Adjust control window, when Settings button is pressed, the control blinks (repaints itself). I tried that with Curves and others, and this doesn't happen there.

As I'm trying to use Adjust more instead of Levels and Color - the only reason is to try to use lower number of transformations in routine adjustments and still have decent control over the image - there are two adjustments in Levels and Color that I use often but can't quite do as easily in Adjust: Auto WB and Auto DR.

I know that there are other ways of doing that (the Levels and Color itself and also Autorange and Color Balance) and that Adjust is designed to be simple and uncluttered, but I figured I would mention it anyway.

In Adjust itself, it is only possible to create one mask for all tabs. To be able to pick different masks for different tabs, one needs to insert the Mask Transformation upstream of Adjust and create the masks there. Is that correct?

There is only one mask for the transformation. To use multiple masks, use multiple transformations.

Thanks. I just discovered that even in Adjust - one transformation with four tabs - there is only one mask possible (regardless how may are available from Mask transformation or elsewhere).

Right -- the Amount mask blends the input image with the final result of all the tabs.

I just discovered that the Curves Control\Settings (also in Adjust\Curves tab) natively includes Autorange! Great! Probably using the same default threshold as the Levels and Color, I imagine?

An unrelated comment: in Adjust, the four tabs at the bottom bring up the appropriate controls - the four buttons at the top toggle on and off the effect of each tab on the final preview. The hoover tips for those top buttons say "XXX Settings". Maybe something like "Display/Toggle/Preview/Include XXX (Tab) (in Preview" would make an even better tip?

p.s. I still think that the Brightness Curve\Advanced mode kicks ass and is underappreciated...