If your explaination above is true then I think you have your terminology is incorrect. "Highlights" are at the top of the spectrum being the whitest whites in an image, usually containing no details, where as "Whites" would come under that being the first whites with details. Those are pretty standard definitions for as long as I have been a photographer, which is over 30 years. You might consider re-lableing those as I found it confusing also.

MadManChan2000,

How about renaming the "Whites" to "White Point" and the "Blacks" to "Black Point" to avoid confusion and for being in sync with photographers terminology?

WW

wmp_slc wrote:

 

"Highlights" are at the top of the spectrum being the whitest whites in an image, usually containing no details.

Highlights do contain details. Specular, clipped or blown highlights don't.

That's my understanding anyway.

wmp_slc wrote:

 

Now to me "brightest part" means brighter than a word like "Whites"

Really?  To me, "white" is all channels at saturation.  When you go into Photoshop and click on the right-most eyedropper in the "Levels" tool, the tooltip says "Set White Point".  The "Whites" slider in LR is very much like the right-most slider (the "White point" slider) in PS.  So the term "Whites" seems to be consitent with the terminology in PS.  Also, the "Shadows" and "Highlights" sliders seem to control similar areas of the image to the "Shadows" and "Highlights" sliders in the parametric tone curve panel inside Lightroom, whereas I'd call "Whites" the top-right point in the point-curve version of that same panel, and "Blacks" the lower-left point.  Seems intuitive and consistent to me.

So for some reason it sounds like there is no consensus. In my mind there is no way I would consider a highlight to be duller than a white, which is what you are saying. I do stand corected on the "Specular Highlight" comment and bow to that, but that only strengthens my view that the tonal range would move from midtones to whites to hightlights to specular highlights if defined with words. Seems odd if it was - midtones, highlights, whites, specular highlights?? I think the confusion is in using the terms whites and highlights together which I don't think has been done before. There is common use of "white point" and "black point" since the intro of PS put that is not white in general, that is one particular value, 255,255,255 or 0,0,0 and not a range of tones.

If you look at LR 3 it seems you are replacing the recovery slider, which occupies the same far right portion of the histogram, with "whites" whereas I would define the recovery slider as a way to recover lost highlight detail moving from specular to a toned highlight. So it seems more natural, to me, that that last area of the histogram is highlights.

I guess to each his or her own but I am surprised there is not consensus on this.

+1 for white point / black point

Rikk Flohr wrote:

 

Perhaps you shouldn't think of Whites as a tonal range. It is a control for selectively moving tones into or recovering out of White after Exposure and Highlights have been adjusted.  Those tones being moved into and out of white tend to to be but are not limited to the brightest tones of the Highlights.

 

@Velo, it is likely that interface space would prevent the use of White Point and Black Point - especially in non-english languages.

When you put an "s" on the end of a word it then makes it plural, which in this case refers to multiple tones of white, which is a range. It's all semantics, I understand what you are saying and I could totally be wrong but I, like the original poster, instictively went to the highlight slider to adjust the clipping point of the the brightest point. Just seem correct - "to me"

If you go back to my referance of the recovery slider in LR3 controling the same range as what is now whites in LR4, I found this definition in the LR3 help section

Sure it will. It'll take longer for some than for others, though.

Hal

Perhaps we could call them Plugged and Blown instead of Blacks and Whites?

I don't think this is splitting hairs. Terminology is critical to usability, and this terminology while "learnable" is not intuitive. This is the feedback that Adobe needs to receive during a beta.

wmp_slc wrote:

 

But you are using a different term. You are saying white and the term in question is whites. One is a single point and one is a range of tones. Where do you place highlights in the range of white tones? At the dark side or the light side?

Oh, I see, it's the plural that's confusing to you.  Yeah, I could see that (never thought of it myself, though).  Just think of them as White and Black, I would say.

Lee Jay wrote:

 

wmp_slc wrote:

 

But you are using a different term. You are saying white and the term in question is whites. One is a single point and one is a range of tones. Where do you place highlights in the range of white tones? At the dark side or the light side?

 

Oh, I see, it's the plural that's confusing to you.  Yeah, I could see that (never thought of it myself, though).  Just think of them as White and Black, I would say.

I am not confused I just think their terminology is flawed. Maybe they should just name it White and Black then and not Whites and Blacks as we kind of suggested with the addition of the word point. I just think there is an inconsistency in the transition form the LR1,2,3 controls to the new method in the LR4 in the labeling and trying to point out what may be something to reconsider before the final version comes out, which is supposedly what this forum is all about. I will learn to use it without a problem, but it will probably always bug me. How I see it, blacks are the dark end of shadow tones and Highlights are the light end of white tones. But I guess there are a number of you who don't agree which really surprizes me. Consider this. The warning for over exposure shown by blinking black on your camera is called a highlight warning. If whites were brighter than highlights then wouldn't they call this a white warning?

MadManChan2000 wrote:

 

We used "Blacks" in ACR and LR for many years and to be honest it just wasn't an issue.

But white or whites was never used simultaneously with the term highlights. I think that is the core problem (if it is a problem). It may go all the way back to my zone system days but I think whether analog or digital the tonal scale should be represented accurately with uniform descrptions and it seems like you are moving descriptions of tones from one area of the histogram to another. I think we have hashed this apart and you have my input and I appreciate you listening, now it is in your court to do as you feel right.

Thanks for your ear.