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Tonality and Color Controls
The Tonality and Color controls, shown in Figure 4, remain largely unchanged, with the exception that a new Tint control has been added in the Color panel to reduce any color casts you may have in your images. The Tonality controls are very similar in name and purpose to the tone-mapping workflow found in Lightroom 4 and ACR 7 Basic panels. For example, the Highlights and Shadows controls in HDR Efex Pro 2 do a great job of controlling and revealing detail in the brightest and darkest quarter of tones, respectively (except the tones close to pure black or pure white—which are handled by the Blacks and Whites controls).
However, unlike Lightroom or ACR, the Color controls in HDR Efex Pro are very limited in what they can do. For that reason, you may be better off handling color edits in your raw workflow. If you do, make sure to sync those color edits across all the exposures you intend to merge, so that you don’t wind up with unexpected results.
In Figure 4, I boosted the Exposure value a bit and protected the highlight details in the background using the Highlights slider. I also added a bit more black to the area under the trees (at right), using a combination of the Shadows slider and Blacks slider to define where the darker details remained visible and where they were clipped. I also added a bit of Structure to increase the apparent sharpness of the shot, without harming the smooth water details.
Minimal changes were made to the Temperature and Tint, with a modest boost in Saturation. Basically, the main benefit of these color controls is to remove color casts and enhance color intensity once you’ve done that.
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Figure 4 The Tonality Settings provide the primary “tone-mapping” controls in HDR Efex Pro 2, allowing you to control highlight details, shadow details, and midtones.