Kodak SHO vs Shadow/Highlight

A friend of mine showed me this plugin he uses to lift underexposed images. I was truly impressed with the results. He ran it against CS3's Shadow/Highlight adjustment tool. SHO seems to do a better job of lifting shadows while maintaining contrast, whereas S/H results appears more washed out and flat. SHO also retains more detail, and generates less noise.

Granted this wasn't a very detailed comparison. I didn't play around much with the advanced sliders of S/H, so it might be possible to achieve better results if I was more judicious with the tonal width & radius sliders. But even then SHO still has the ease of use advantage.

I'm very tempted to pick this up for myself. I'm just wondering if anyone else here has tried this plugin and could confirm/deny these impressions.

Have you tried using ACR in Photoshop. You would be amazed at what it can do.

Fred

Oh right, I forgot that you can use ACR on jpegs too. Yes it gets great result, though it tends to be noisy on JPEGs, that's why I tended to shy away from using ACR on jpegs. Too bad I can't do a new round of comparisons anymore. OK, I won't be getting the plugin, but I just know this is going to turn into a persistent itch in the back of my head always thinking would I have gotten better results with it.

It would have to be very good to justify its £54.10 asking price! It appears to date back to late 2003, I beleive that is before Shadow/Highlight arrived. I used to use Intrigue Technologies' Shadow Illuminator Pro when I used PSE2 which worked just fine, but I do not use it with CS3.

I have been using it for 2 years now, and your observation is correct.

This plug-in is better at lifting shadows while at the same time having little to no impact on colors where H&S has a much more significant negative impact on the colors.

Thanks, good to know I'm not just seeing things. Still pondering if it's worth the asking price. It would certaintly gives me more options to shoot at higher shutter speed / smaller aperture in low light. If this would give me something like the equivalent of a 2-stop advantage, I'd definitely pick this up.

Have you compared it to ACR's exposure tweaking features as well?

s_erez said:

I have been using it for 2 years now, and your observation is correct.
This plug-in is better at lifting shadows while at the same time
having little to no impact on colors where H&S has a much more
significant negative impact on the colors.

Click to expand...

SHO is an excellent plug in, worth the money, IMO, but there are methods in PS too. Check out the free actions at atn.central. Contrast masks work too. gc

Look online for coupons or discounts for this. I got this and the Kodak (ASF) for just under $150.

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(See profile for equipment)