What to try
- Change Exposure · stops and inspect the citrus, glazed vase and tonal strip.
- Change Brightness · channel offset and compare its transfer curve and number of white-clipped pixels.
What to look for: Exposure multiplies linear light and keeps black at black. An encoded offset also lifts black. Flat curve segments merge distinct source values.
How it works
Brightness adds an encoded-channel offset, while contrast expands or contracts values around a midpoint. Saturation changes distance from a neutral value. Hue rotation moves colors around a hue coordinate, and color balance shifts channels with weights for shadows, midtones or highlights.
Exposure is measured in stops: one stop doubles linear-light values before they are encoded again. Gamma reshapes midtones nonlinearly. Solarization conditionally inverts values beyond a threshold. These operations are not interchangeable, and clipping at black or white can discard distinctions.
Use it in the Lab
Choose the Color adjustments category for broad corrections and Levels or Curves for a more explicit transfer function. Use live comparison and keep an original layer when exploring large shifts. Alpha is preserved by these color treatments.
Limits & distinctions
These tools operate on the current raster layer. They are not RAW development controls and cannot restore highlight detail already clipped in the source.
Sources & references
Guide updated