Activate the markers, use the Tone Curve to set black & white point and you are good.
– Of course it would help to better visualize, if there was a (simple) histogram in the Tone Curve tool.
In my experience C1 starts with more contrast as a starting point.
So don’t be afraid to start with the contrast a bit up.
Also, lowering the white slider in ACR is kinda like lowering the final point in the curves / levels tool.
Even if you keep the curve a straight line, the starting point is like the blacks slider , and the end point is like the white slider.
But to be honest , I never used it 
.
Setting the exposure first , and then tweaking smart lighting and/or contrast and selective tones gets me there.
For flat pictures raising the midtones contrast can also I crease local contrast while keeping the blacks and whites kinda where they are.
I’m intrigued … What’s “True Tone” ?
John M
True Tone technology in Mac computers and Apple Pro Display XDR uses advanced multichannel sensors to adjust the color and intensity of your display … to match the ambient light so that images appear more natural.
Source: Apple
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As @platypus states really.
It’s most ‘obvious’ under artificial light or darker conditions but it can make colours appear warmer than they would be with True Tone turned off.
Google will throw up plenty who argue either way for having it on or off but so long as you are aware it could be affecting what you see on screen then it’s for the individual to decide.
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As a new user, coming from LR v6.14, the white slider was the first thing I found missing from Photolab . It is so easy to bring an image to life using it in LR.
Welcome to the forum, @jerry12953 .
PhotoLab has a selective tones tool. It provides adjustments for highlights, midtones, shadows and blacks.
You can find out more about this tool on page 109 of the user guide and here:
Note that the selective tone sliders’ separation is less pronounced than what the sliders provide in Lightroom.
That was my experience many years ago but you will find that it is not required. Either adjust the exposure, the Smart Lighting or both to give yourself a very good starting point.
Just think how much easier it would be if there was a whites slider!
I could not agree more, although I suppose using the whites end of the histogram is close. Personally I do find that a shortfall and I find the masking clunky to say the least. Noise reduction rules ok though so these days I just round trip from Lr if necessary.
Yes, I understand your point. DXO doesn’t have the “direct” slider control over the image tonality. By that I mean that if you want to just impact the top part of the histogram you just pull the Whites slider. If you want to impact the bottom part of the histogram, you just pull the Blacks slider. Want to move the midtones without impacting the top and bottom of the histogram, just pull the Brightness slider.
I think this is down to DXO’s historical development where they focused on providing “auto” corrections of images. Also DXO were late to Local Adjustments and therefore we have the very clever “Smart Lighting” but you can’t control exactly what it will do. By that I mean “I want to pull back the highlights” or I want to “raise the shadows”. You have to move the slider and see what you get or “draw boxes” in the hope you get the result you are after. Smart lighting is an extremely clever tool as it effectively gives you some of the effects of a masked adjustment without user masks. Such a tool was vital when DXO didn’t have Local Adjustments.
You can of course accomplish such adjustments with the Curves tool all of the slider adjustments we have are just easier ways to manipulate the curves tool. However, simple sliders have become the industry norm and it would be an improvement in Photolab if we had access to direct adjustment sliders.This reliance on the Curves tool is made worse by the lack of a Levels adjustment tool.Again you can move the Curve end points but that only makes the Curves UI more difficult to use as it reduces the effective size of the tool making fine adjustments, or adjustments to several parts of the tone curve difficult. C1 offers all the various sliders but if you want to do detail work on the Curve you can pull out as a free floating tool. The practical difference is that on a 27" 1440p screen DXO curve dialogue is 5x5cm compared to 30x30cm in C1.
I would like to see DXO introduce direct targetted slider controls that allow adjustments to the histogram. As others have said the existing Tone controls are very broad and moving one impacts adjacent tonal areas.
Simply by seperating out the control function of the Smart Lighting control into a “Fill Light” for shadows and a “Highlight Compression” sliders would go a long way to improving matters. As this “code” already exists it shouldn’t be too onerous a coding task to provide the new functionality. The Smart Lighting slider can stay to provide backwards compatibility. If direct slider control over the histogram is not possibly, making the Curves tool available as a large on-screen overlay would improve the Curves UI greatly.
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Lightroom’s approach: A pickup tool, customisable crossover points, histogram background and a display of the slider’s scope and range:
There’s not me I envy from Lr but this is one thing. It makes its so much easier to adjust the tone curve when it begins and ends at the edges, rather than a ridiculously steep curve.
Really hope, that DxO will incorporate the picker and a background histogram – making it easier to handle!
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Roundtripping to DxO from LR is what I would like to achieve in the short term as I am pretty handy with Lightroom now. Unfortunately I am told by DxO customer support that DxO is not compatible with my version of lightroom (6.14) !
How to work around that was going to be my next question to the forum!
If this is the case *, you’ll just edit the images in PhotoLab and save them to the originating folder as DNGs. Back in Lightroom, right-click on the originating folder and select synchronise. I’d recommend to switch off .xmp sync in DPL’s settings - assuming that you’ve already added keywords in Lightroom.
Note: * The DPL5 user guide describes Lr workflows from page 212 and says:
I don’t know what you want to say here…let me assume that you like to be able to grab the TC’s endpoints and drag them wherever you want. I do too, and Lightroom happily obliges with another tone curve mode option:
I don’t have Lightroom, so I don’t know what the white slider is doing.
Therefore I googled for doing the effect of the white slider with a curves adjustment. Hoping to find how to do this with a curves adjustment.
Then I came across the following video explaining the different results of sliders in Lightroom and curves adjustments. I found it amazing to see what the highlight and shadow sliders of Lightroom are doing. The video: Lightroom Classic - Sliders vs Curves - why I will never edit my images the same way again! - YouTube
But also to see that the white slider is acting different then expected.
Think PL’s Smart Lighting similar to LR’s Highlight & Shadow sliders …
They do say it is similar when used with other PL tools. Personally I do not find it intuitive and much prefer the Lr approach…and the C1 and the ON1 approach which is essentially the same. PL’s sliders do impact different ranges to Lr and its equivalent imo.
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