About the contrast slider

Question

Hello everyone,

I'm just curious about how you use the contrast slider.

With shift key pressed and double click on the basic sliders Lightroom applies automatically the values. This operation can be useful, for example, to set the white and the black points.

I just noticed that using the shift key + contrast Lightroom doesn't go never more then 6-7. It apply automatically always a very low contrast to the files.

What do you think about it?

johnrellis · Answer

Shift-double-click of a Basic slider is weird, in my opinion. For Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Vibrance, and Saturation, it sets the slider to what Auto Settings would set it. But Auto Settings uses an AI algorithm to set all the Basic sliders in concert (based on a training set provided by professional photographers), so using shift-double-click to apply just one setting in isolation doesn't seem useful.

But Whites and Blacks are an exception. Rather than setting them to what Auto would, shift-double-click appears to use a simple percentage based algorithm, setting Blacks, say, to include just the bottom 1% of the pixels and Whites to include the top 1% (I don't know the actual percentages). That matches the heuristic of many users setting the white and black points.

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