In een blog entry van het soort waar ik het schijt aan heb (A-list mens “ontdekt” in een programma een feature die elke half normale gebruiker al eeuwen weet zijn en weet te gebruiken, A-list mens wordt daarop uitvoerig bedankt door sycofanten allerhande), schrijft de mens van Design By Fire meer uitleg over Shadow/Highlight (de feature in kwestie):
It is more than a repackaged Curves tool. Todor and Chien (the two brilliant engineers who work on a lot of the algorithmic stuff in Photoshop) found a way to analyze an image and recursively move through it to correct shadow or highlight detail. As the algorithm moves through the image, it’s analyzing whether a radius of pixels fall into a shadow or highlight area and corrects to the slider value.
The end effect is the feature locking down certain areas while it fixes others. This brings out detail in ways that are both subtle in those areas, but dramatic in the overall scheme of the photo.
To do this with Curves would require multiple layers, each with detailed layer masks to lock out certian areas. Further, with Curves, you would still have the issue that curves “pull” pixels in directions (it’s a curve so the correction is distributed over the curve). So as each layer overlaps, areas where the layer masks overlap create competing corrections on the pixels in that overlap.
Shadow/Highlight bypasses all of that, while also producing a superior image in many ways to that technique.
It’s the kind of feature we’ll see more of in the second decade of graphics software. The first decade was getting the bare bones, brass tacks sorts of things working. We are now moving past that, building features based on the wealth of knowledge collected in that decade.
Now, In Photoshop we have Shadow/Highlight and Replace Color. With InDesign, we have a text engine that can analyze across multiple pages to create the best color for text with the least amount of hyphenation, awkward word and letter spacing and river control. Illustrator is getting some new features in this respect as well, but you’ll have to wait and see what they are.
Shadow/Highlight definitely is a killer feature.
Dat is boeiend en interessant om weten.
En, ook wel grappig, in dezelfde commentaren ontstaat een discussie tussen de mensen van DxF, die van zeer zeer nauw te maken heeft (gehad) met Photoshop en een fanboy van Gimp.