Benefits
of the plugin

Compensate over- or under- exposure inside your photo software
Target exposure compensation to any range of shadows, mid tones or lights
Target exposure compensation to any range of colors

The exposure compensation filter plugin works with these image modes (Win and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, Lab.

Exposure correction
filter controls

This is the exposure correction plug-ins control panel. Click on the photo or the links to see the plug-in at full size.

The filter has four sets of controls:

1. Correct over- or under-exposure
2. Adjust exposure and compensate color loss.
3. Target compensation to a brightness-range.
4. Target compensation to a color-range.

Example -

The exposure correction plugin is indispensable for doing exposure compensations inside you photo software.

The central square is the original unfiltered image

Exposure

Exposure

This control-group changes exposure and other related factors.

Since badly exposed areas often lack proper color definition, we implemented the option to adjust saturation.

Black Alert and White Alert will notify you of areas, that clip pure white and pure black

Exposure stops

Exposure
Correction

The Exposure Stops slider is carefully calibrated to do the same as regular aperture/exposure stops (see examples below). The exposure slider designates steps of 1/3 with the value 0.33, 2/3 with 0.66 etc. When you turn on "Exposure Correction, the algorithm is the same as used in our BW Studio plugin; but the Exposure Corrector plugin offers a larger range. If you enable Exposure Correction, then the plugin emulates what the image would have look like, if exposed differently. If you do not enable Exposure Correction, the plugin will reexpose the image (this produces a harder look).

Examples of exposure filtering compared to Fuji standards

Fuji chart of exposures

This chart used above is mainly concerned with push processing, but third column illustrates normal exposure bracketing and is used for the above. See the full size scan here (225 kb jpeg) if you want to verify these examples for yourself. [Scanned from: Fuji Pro-Value, August 2001, vol. 6].

Offset

Offset will simply add or subtract an even amount of brightness from the entire image; hence make it brighter or darker.

This can be used in conjunction with either Exposure or Shadow Depth.

Shadow Depth

Shadow Depth will darken shadows by reducing their exposure.

Color

The color slider does not do simple saturation, but will emulate the way colors are more or less saturated in nature as can be deduced from the image.

Examples

Compensating underexposure

Examples

Compensating overexposure
and faded photos

Correction Area

Correction Area

These sliders let you decide it you want to apply exposure correction lights, midtones or darks.

Graduated effect

These controls are common for many of the Power Retouche plug-ins. Using graduated effect will cause the filter to apply it's filtering at full strength in one side of the image and then fade the effect out towards the other side. You can change direction by right clicking the preview. Midpoint will shift the balance between how large an area will be filtered at full strength and how much will have a faded out effect. Contrast will change the accelleration and spread of the fade-out.

In this example we applied a graduated effect towards the bottom, setting midpoint low. This retouch brought light into the underexposed foreground, bringing it forward, without altering the horizon or sky.

Use brightness range

Brightness range

Dark limit
Light limit
Target
Mask

These three sliders let you target your exposure compensation to a specific brightness range.

Dark limit - pixels darker that this will remain unchanged.
Light limit -pixels lighter than this will remain unchanged.
Target - pixels at this brightness value will be changed the most.
Mask unchanged - checking this will mask all pixels out of range as the selected mask color. Change the color by clicking in the colored rectangle.

Example of targeted exposure compensation

Example of targeted exposure compensation

Use color range

These filter controls let you target exposure compensation to a specific range of color hues.
From - only colors to the right of this slider will be changed.
Up to - only colors to the left of this slider will be changed.
This means that depending on if the upper slider is to the left or right of the lower slider, the selected colors will be those in between or outside the sliders.
Softness - when 0, all selected colors will be equally changed. At higher settings, the effect will fade more and more out. The higher the setting, the wider the fadeout, hence the softness.

Example -

Targeting an overexposed sky with color-range

In this photograph the barren and somber mood of the mountains with the isolated dashes of cloud captured our attention, but in the photograph the sky (as is so common) got overexposed.
We used the color-range to target only the blue sky. And then added the brightness range to also mask out the blue shadow on the mountain. Also we wanted the targeted effect than brightness-range provides, so we would get a wider dynamic range into the originally rather flat sky.

This exposure compensation brought the sky and the mountain to the same level. It also gave the photo a unified aesthetic expression.

But now the photo lacks contrast and has a a gray color cast. We simply had to do something about that, so we filtered it with our other plugin filter, Contrast Editor (at General Contrast = 40%), and here's the result...