What is your take on processing these images?

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... how they affect each tonal zone of the preview mainly due to their gradual blending in to each other to where I can't see where one stops and the other starts within each zone they act on...

Probably because the relationship between sliders is dynamic and inter-dependent, i.e., each slider's effect depends not only on how far you push it, but also on the position of other sliders. That assures smooth and gradual tonal transitions, a great part of why PV 2012 is so superior to the previous ones.

[Hans Kruse]

Here is my edit done in Lightroom 5.6.

[Hans Kruse]

Hi,

Yes and no! Both highlights and shadows do tone mapping. They do compress tonal range, which gives boring images, so they do local contrast adjustments. Just like most HDR tools, but much more subtly. That said they can still bite!

It is a great feature and it is a bad feature. I'll try to post some examples in a day or two.

Best regards
Erik

When using the highlights and shadows sliders it is (in my opinion) needed to add contrast and set the white point and black point appropriately and then it does not give boring images Iterate between highlights and whites, shadows and blacks and fine tune contrast with the tone curve. Highlights and shadows gives very nice and smooth rolloff in both ends of the tonal range.