Both the Highlights and Shadows controls in this system are designed to work in a way that respects the structure of your image within the film emulation pipeline. While they serve similar purposes to traditional controls—brightening or darkening parts of the image—their behavior is significantly more refined and context-aware.

Highlights

In traditional grading tools, highlight adjustments are applied using fixed mathematical formulas. These formulas often cause the highlight manipulation to “bleed” into midtones or even lower ranges, resulting in less targeted control and unwanted changes to the rest of the image.

Here, the Highlights control is specifically drafted to target only the upper tonal range. When you adjust highlights, your mid gray point and whites remain fixed, meaning only the actual highlight region is affected. This prevents tonal spill and keeps the adjustment clean and localized.

• In Scene-Referred Mode, the mid gray reference is based on DaVinci Wide Gamut’s mid gray.
  
• In Full Look + Transform Mode, the plugin respects the Input Gamma’s mid gray, adapting the adjustment to your chosen working space.

This makes highlight tuning much more predictable and non-destructive, especially in film-style workflows where highlight roll-off and preservation of tonal structure are critical.

Shadows

The Shadows control follows the same philosophy but works on the opposite end of the tonal range. Unlike traditional shadow adjustments—which often lift or crush the shadows while unintentionally shifting the black point or pulling midtones along—the FilmVerse shadow tool is isolated in its response.

Here, only the shadow range is influenced, while both the black point and mid gray remain locked. This lets you deepen or lift the shadows without affecting the contrast balance in the rest of the picture. The result is a more precise tonal re-weighting that keeps your picture’s structure intact and avoids the over-compressed look that sometimes occurs with conventional shadow tools.

Just like with highlights, the behavior of shadows adapts depending on the processing mode:

• In Scene-Referred Mode, the control references DaVinci Wide Gamut’s mid gray.
  
  
• In Full Look + Transform Mode, it is aligned to the input gamma you selected, ensuring context-aware behavior.
  
  

Together, these tonal tools offer precise, non-linear manipulation of specific regions in the image, giving you more control while preserving the aesthetic character of a film-based workflow.