Adjust light and tone

The tone controls are at the top of the General section in the right column. They change the active layer, so with one layer they change the whole photo.

Set the overall light

Control	Range	What it does
Exposure	-5.00 to +5.00 stops	Brightens or darkens everything by that many stops. +1 doubles the light.
Brightness	-100 to +100	Lifts or lowers the midtones. Pure black and pure white stay where they are.
Contrast	-100 to +100	Steepens (+) or flattens (-) the tones around the midpoint. At 0 it adds none.
Clarity	-100 to +100	Local contrast. See Clarity.
Highlights	-100 to +100	Pulls bright areas down (-) or opens them up (+).
Highlight Rolloff	-100 to +100	How early and how softly highlights fade into white.
Shadows	-100 to +100	Lifts (+) or deepens (-) the dark areas.

All of them start at 0. Double-click any slider to reset it.

Highlights and Shadows work on regions rather than single pixels, so they change the brightness of a bright or dark area while keeping its texture. Midtones are left alone. Shadows at +100 opens the shadows by about one stop, and black stays black. At strong negative settings, Highlights can leave a faint halo where a dark edge meets a bright area.

Highlight Rolloff at 0 already rolls the very brightest values into white instead of clipping them. Raise it to start the fade earlier for a softer, more film-like shoulder. Lower it for punchier highlights that stay brighter and clip sooner.

Fine-tune under Advanced

Click Advanced, at the bottom of General, to show four more controls for the tone curve and the way bright colors fade. A small dot on the header tells you when one of them is changed while the group is closed.

Control	What it does
Contrast Midpoint	Moves the tone that Contrast pivots around, up to 1.5 stops brighter or darker.
Black Level	Lifts (+) or deepens (-) the darkest tones.
Highlight Bleach	How much bright, saturated colors fade toward white. 0 is the standard look, -100 keeps them colored, +100 fades them more.
Hue Recovery	Keeps bright colors closer to their original hue as they fade. 0 is none.

Note

Turning off the power button of General switches off the highlight roll-off too, so very bright areas clip. The section holds the tone, white balance and saturation controls and the roll-off together.

Technical details: how light is handled

Everything works on linear light, where one stop is a doubling. Exposure multiplies the values by 2 to the power of its setting, the same as changing the light when you shot. Values above white are kept through every step until the display transform, so lowering Exposure can bring back highlight detail that sits above white in the RAW.

Highlights is a local tone change on lightness (Oklab L), driven by an edge-aware blur of the photo, so it moves a whole bright region together and keeps its texture. Shadows is an exposure applied only to the shadow tones, a multiply rather than a lift, so it never raises the black point into a gray veil.

The last step of every render is a display transform (AgX). It leaves shadows and midtones as they are and adds a smooth highlight shoulder, so bright areas roll off to white instead of clipping. Contrast, Contrast Midpoint, Highlight Rolloff, Black Level, Highlight Bleach and Hue Recovery are the controls of that transform. On a local layer they are added to the Base layer’s values. See Layers.