Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Sometimes, it helps to exercise.
Sometimes, that exercise may supply the power to light the bulb int that dim room; the RAW REFINE room.
We ask that you have extra patience for this one as it needs extra attachments as examples.
This is an image for the exercise. Otherwise not worth keeping.

First screen snap 019, is the original... just a piece of mobile artwork against a sky.
The rest of the scene is sort of dark and murky. You could leave it if you wish; for effect, or we can use it for the exercise.

If you wanted to show the buildings across the water with no regard to keeping the odd light and cloud pattern, Click on the building and activate the blue box.
Box appears with three colors and OFF.
This tells Qimage Ultimate: I want the exposure changed to favor the building; the heck with the rest!
See snap 020.  Then you just add or remove FILL light.

Now, we change our mind. Maybe I'd like to retain some of that interesting cloud action.
See snap 021
I selected the grid with the clouds, and when the box opened, this time I selected the Magenta frame.
This tells Qimage Ultimate: Hey. This is the important part and don't lose those clouds if you can help it.

OK we move to snap 022... showing nothing more than moving the FILL slider to the plus side until you get the scene to be decently lighted.
But we lost the definition and detail in the clouds that were there....

Now we need to move to the next post to  complete the challenge.
We need to recover much the clouds.

OK lets look at the next screen snap.
Actually it's number #24.
We moved the HDR to the right slowly watching the clouds detail returning...
If the building changes shades, you went too far. Come back.

Now look at 023, the last snap.

A bit of leveling the horizon, and a touch of contrast in Levels in the editor, it it ain't that bad!

Find one of your throw-aways, and exercise!!!

Have fun.
Fred

That is more or less what I do anyway, though not always as successful as your illustrations,  also, Qimage default is so good all that usually it is not necessary to do much 'fiddling'

I will have a fiddle later and see what.

Jeff   

You are absolutely right, Jeff.
I actually spent days trying to find an image that was weird enough so I could use to demo some of the scary tools in the REFINE screen.
People got so used to sliders that a new actually more sensible, set of tools was daunting to some.
Instead if sliding things like a Luminance slider, a contrast, brightness, Clarity, Brightness, Blacks, Fill Light, Recovery, Exposure, Vibrance, Saturation, Temperature, and tint, we have a system that does most of that for you, and still allows you to do some personalizing using reason. (I want to keep that sky)   (That's a shot of my kids and I want them to look perfect. The heck with the sky)
I actually have a shot of Terry that has a bright spot, a glare coming from the sun off his forehead.
He and I practiced for a number of hours on the best way to minimize/get rid of it.
That's how WE learned!! 
That's how I was hoping others might get the hang of it too. Exercise!

 YOU decide what you were trying to go for in that shot... and sensibly click on an area telling Qimage that you want to accentuate this or brighten that.
The exercise was designed to have people who were puzzled by only THREE sliders.... only three, to realize that Mike's developing algorithm already has gamma and contrast curves built into the FILL, for example.
Try different grid squares! See what the reaction is,,, see the differences...... 

Fred