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Zone-Based Exposure Adjustments
Each zone has its own Exposure control that allows you to stretch image contrast from that zone’s Min or Max range boundary either down towards the shadows, or up towards the highlights. As seen on the Zone graph (found on the Zone panel), exposure adjustments are made on a scale measured in stops, to provide a more photographic experience when grading wide dynamic range material.
The scale of the Zone graph shows you the shadow and highlight ranges, in stops, relative to 0 representing 18 percent photographic gray
On this scale, 0 stops corresponds to photographic 18% gray, at the center of each image’s tonal range. Shadows then fall to the left over -8 stops, while highlights fall to the right over +8 stops, where each stop represents either twice the amount of light (stopping up) or half the amount of light (stopping down).
In conjunction with Resolve Color Management, this range is designed to accommodate any SDR or HDR range you’ll be mastering to. All HDR palette controls are designed to accommodate up to 16 stops of exposure. By comparison, most modern digital cinema cameras claim to be able to capture somewhere between 13-19 stops of dynamic range, while a white paper from the ASC states that modern film negatives are capable of capturing 14 stops of dynamic range.
Unlike the Lift/Gamma/Gain or Log master level controls, the Exposure adjustment of each zone starts at a specific boundary of image tonality, and stretches all the way out through the highlights or shadows, through the maximum or minimum signal level allowable. Since Shadow and Light are the two zones that are centered on the midtones of the image, they’re the best zones for seeing how this works. Because of this, these are also probably the first two zones you’ll want to adjust if you’re making more specific exposure changes to the image.
Using the default preset, Shadow exposure adjustments affects everything in the image from stop 1 down through absolute black.
(Left) The original image, (Right) Darkening all shadows by lowering the Shadow exposure adjustment