User Manual

Table Of Contents
Soft Clip
The Soft Clip controls consist of four sliders underneath the Curve controls of the Custom
curves, and give you an interface for adjusting highlight and shadow soft clipping either overall,
with Ganging enabled, or on a per-channel basis. The Soft Clip controls are intended to provide
clip-by-clip adjustment, as opposed to the Generate Soft Clip LUT settings, which let you set
one soft-clipping setting for the entire program. For more information on the Soft Clip LUT
setting, see Chapter 3, “System and User Preferences.
High and Low Soft Clip controls
within the Curves palette
Soft clipping lets you apply a “knee” to any clipping that occurs at the upper or lower extremes
of the image, and can be used to quickly ease off any unpleasantly harsh loss of detail that
occurs as a result of blowing out the highlights or crushing the shadows too aggressively.
In the following example, the screenshot at top has had the highlights deliberately blown out by
excessively boosting the highlight contrast. As you can see, the edges of the clipped area lack
detail. The screenshot at bottom shows the same image with soft clipping increased for all three
color channels. The result retrieves detail, compressing the highlights to bring the tops of each
color channel back within the allowable range.
Using High Soft Clip to pull highlight details into the viewable range
Chapter – 118 Curves 2683