Highlights recovery not as good as Adobe still

Discuss Photomator and photo editing.
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2023-11-03 15:01:05

When I was editing some night city shots RAW files that have a couple light signs in it that are overblown, when pulling highlights down, I can get quite a bit more out of the same image in Photoshop. I do not own PS myself but have tried it on a friends Mac. We just opened the image and didn't do anything else than pull the highlights down to see if there is a difference.

In PS one can get a better image out of it. When going down 90 or 100% on the highlights slider, the effect is quite a bit stronger on PS. In Photomator it is not possible to get the highlights down as in PS. Probably the same with shadows but I have not compared it.

Wondering if this is something that will be further improved in Photomator. As far as I remember there was an update last year that said it improved shadow and highlight recovery significantly. But looks like it is not quite on the level of PS.
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2023-11-03 16:16:01

In Photomator try holding the option key it doubles the slider range.
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2023-11-04 10:08:29

by Martin Chalifoux In Photomator try holding the option key it doubles the slider range.
I can see that option key affects some sliders such as exposure or brightness as you say.
But it does not affect all sliders and also on highlights slider I can see no change and no added latitude.

Some other sliders like clearity or texture also do not seem to be affected by the option key.
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2023-11-06 14:27:56

I also occasionally have trouble pulling as much texture out of light areas compared to what I've been able to do using another product (Darkroom, in my case).

This isn't a perfect comparison for a number of reasons, but here's part of a photo with a cloudy sky. In Photomator it's mostly an indistinct gray:
Image

In Darkroom, the clouds have much more texture throughout. This is a result I've struggled to recreate in Photomator:
Image
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2023-11-29 09:13:16

I have the same problem with Photomator
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2023-12-05 16:42:51

Might be worth filling in the contact form to ask the pixelmator team if this is a known issue they are looking at or if not if they maybe could?