Shadow Tonal Width, Highlight Tonal Width; Color Correction; Midtone Contrast - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 7.0 Manual

Original (left), and with effect applied (right)
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To correct the shadow and highlight of a given frame relative to surrounding frames, specify a duration of time in
seconds for the Temporal Smoothing control.
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To set the Temporal Smoothing control to ignore frames in different scenes, select Scene Detect.
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To adjust the effect's transparency, adjust the Blend With Original control.
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For finer control, adjust the controls in the More Options controls group.
The Shadow/Highlight effect provides the following options to help you fine-tune your results:

Shadow Tonal Width, Highlight Tonal Width

modified. Smaller values restrict the adjustments to only the darker regions for Shadow correction and only the
lighter regions for Highlight correction. Larger values include more tonal regions (such as adding the midtones) that
are being adjusted. A value of 100% produces a linear effect; for Shadow correction, deep shadows get modified the
most with no correction to bright highlights and half the shadow correction to midtones. The tonal width require-
ments vary from image to image. Specifying a value that is too large for a given image might introduce halos around
strong dark to light edges. The default settings attempt to reduce these artifacts. These halos may occur when the
Shadow or Highlight Amount values are too large; they can also be reduced by decreasing these values.
The Tonal Width default value is 50%. If you're trying to lighten a dark subject but the midtones or lighter regions
are changing too much, try reducing the Shadow Tonal Width towards zero; then only the darkest regions are
lightened. On the other hand, if you need to brighten up the midtones as well as the shadows, increase the Shadows Tonal
Width toward 100%.
Fine-tunes the colors in regions that have changed in a color image. For example, if you increase

Color Correction

the Shadows Amount value, you bring out colors that were dark in the original image. You may want these colors to
be more or less vivid. Adjust the Color Correction slider to give the best results. In general, increasing values tends
to produce more saturated colors, and decreasing values produces less saturated colors.
Note: Since the Color Correction value affects only changed portions of the image, the amount of color variation depends
on how much or little Shadows Amount or Highlights Amount is applied. The greater the correction to the shadows and
highlights, the greater the range of color correction available. The Color Correction value applies subtle control over the
darkened or lightened colors in the image. If you want to change the color hues or saturation over the whole image, use
the Hue/Saturation effect after applying the Shadow/Highlight effect.
Adjusts the contrast in the midtones. A negative value reduces contrast, and a positive value

Midtone Contrast

increases contrast. An increase in Midtone Contrast adjustment produces greater contrast in the midtones while
tending to darken the shadows and lighten the highlights.
Specify how much of the shadows and highlights are clipped to the new extreme shadow (level
Black Clip, White Clip
0) and highlight (level 255) colors in the image. Larger values produce an image with greater contrast. Be careful of
setting the clipping values too large, as this reduces detail in the shadows or highlights as the intensity values get
clipped and sent to pure black or white.
Controls the range of tones in the shadows or highlights that are
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