What is "highlight tone priority" good for anyway?

[Marsu42]

To me the clipped highlights look a lot worse than a little shadow grain that is unnoticeable when printed.

Of course clipped highlights are worse than shadow noise - the question is just if htp is not outperformed by shooting at half iso, underexposing 1ev (thus saving the highlights) and then raising the shadows with an intelligent algorithm like in LR4 in contrast to applying just a dumb tone curve in the raw converter...

 

[nikkito]

after reading all this i got confused. ha!
for those shooting Raw and using lightroom having HTP activated doesn't change anything. or am i getting all wrong?

 

[Marsu42]

after reading all this i got confused. ha!

You're correct: you're confused ... but I'm sure Canon marketing wants people confused and thinking that htp is a mini-hdr mode (as I thought) or magically expands the dynamic range of the sensor. Fyi: htp changes the tone curve when shooting jpeg or raw. In jpeg the effect is applied in the camera, for raw as it seems from the discussion above in the raw converter (Canon dpp, Adobe raw).

 

[nikkito]

Wahrscheinlich ist es so wie du sagst
I know it's not a mini HDR or something like that. What I'm asking myself now is if I can get the same results when i Post process a picture with Lightroom. Does it makes a difference if you have it on or not?

I used to have it on, not the same with ALO since I know that works only if you're shooting raw (or jpg) and post processing with DPP.

 

[adamkozlowski]

YMMV, but i used HTP for video. It enabled me to have a lot more detail in the highlights. And of course it's useful to all those "brave" people who shoot JPG.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

For those who are confused, The purpose of HTP (Highlight Tone Priority) is to prevent over exposure of highlights while still allowing you to view details in shadow areas.

It underexposes one stop, and the tone curve it uses for in camera jpegs lightens up darker areas so you can see a bit of the detail. Its pretty subtle, so there is not a huge difference, but if you are sending out of camera jpegs straight to a printer or to the web, it may help.

You do not want to use it unless you have bright areas in a scens along with areas in the shade that will be too dark to see details when underexposed one stop.

 

[Marsu42]

You cannot get around thinking while shooting and looking at the histogram and search for clipped areas.

With a high contrast scene, it doesn't really matter if you underexpose manually or use htp - but imho you're more flexible when doing it yourself, because you can underexpose not just 1ev, but a little more or less because too much underexposure than necessary to save the highlights will introduce noise when re-raising the shadows in postprocessing.

 

[Bosman]

I recommend just using your histogram and another level past that the color histogram. This will ensure even your colors aren't clipped.