Well, some might take issue...
Hi Jeff,
I don't see why... But then some people take issue with the strangest things.
You and I may be familiar with the peculiarities of a couple of Raw converters, but many people are not, hence the warning to pay attention to the highlight rendering of LR/ACR, and also of the default film curve response setting in Capture One Pro. I see nothing wrong with warning.
Then there is also the possibility that people do not know what they are missing, until it is pointed out to them in plain words and examples. A demonstration can help. A good example of an eye opener, is the
article by Charles Cramer here on LuLa.
From his article the following example:
Below is a well-exposed image showing how the new Highlights slider can bring out detail and nicely separate highlights without affecting other tones. Previously, this was very hard to do, but the Highlights slider now makes it much easier. This is a huge advance, as I feel highlights are very important in an image.
Image at the left: Highlights Slider at 0, Image at the right: Highlights Slider at -100
Mind you, -100 (!) on the Highlights slider to get back some highlight tonality
on a correctly exposed image. That means that without such drastic intervention, one will lose a lot of realism right from the get-go.
All you need to do is to add a bit of Whites to pop those dim speculars...ain't no hard thing. Fact is, ARC/LR does a remarkable job of adjusting the tone curve of digital captures. In fact, ACR/LR does a better job of dealing with high dynamic range images than pretty much any raw converter out there.
You may be confusing the functionality of a Raw converter with that of an image editing application. Capture One's Raw conversion is very good, extracts a lot of detail with few artifacts, and offers a lot of tools that help to produce a very solid baseline image, ready for final editing. It even has some tools to produce final output, but I prefer other software that does a superior job at that specialized task, such as the mentioned Topaz Clarity, but even for capture sharpening there are much better tools than Capture One, or LR/ACR for that matter, offer.
Bottom line? Modifying a really touch raw capture tone curve is easier in ACR/LR PV 2012 (something C1 would admit). C1 does a decent (good) job on color but C1 tone is a bit less that ACR/LR PV 2012. That's a fact...
Declaring something a bit personal/subjective (comparing usability of feature sets of a Rawconverter versus those of an image editior, i.e. a workflow preference) as a fact of superiority, seems 'a bit' misleading, to say the least. Some might take issue ...
Cheers,
Bart