Cut the tonal range: push everything above a highlight limit to white and everything below a shadow limit to black, per channel or by brightness, with a mode that paints the clipped areas so you can see them.
Sets two hard limits on brightness. Any value above the highlight limit becomes 255, pure white; any value below the shadow limit becomes 0, pure black; everything in between is left exactly as it was. The limits are percentages of full scale, so 90 percent means 230 out of 255. In Each channel mode the cut is applied to red, green and blue separately, which is how a camera sensor and most editors clip. In Brightness mode the pixel's luminance decides, and clipped pixels go to neutral white or black.
A 3600 × 2400 product photo on a light-grey seamless background at around 92 percent brightness: highlights at 90 percent turns the whole backdrop pure white in one move while the product, which peaks at 85 percent, is untouched. That saves a masking job before Remove Background or a marketplace upload that requires white. For a gritty poster, 70 / 30 in Brightness mode crushes the tails and leaves a hard-edged mid-tone photo that Posterize Effect can then reduce to four levels.
Use it to force a near-white background to true white, to blacken a dark background for a cut-out, to make a stylised high-key or low-key image, or with Show clipped areas as an exposure checker. Do not use it as a general contrast tool on portraits; because it is a hard cut, skin near the limit gets flat patches with no gradation. Change Contrast or Change Exposure are the gentle versions. Keep the original file: clipped values cannot be recovered.
Highlights runs from 50 to 100 percent; 100 is off. Shadows runs from 0 to 50; 0 is off. The chips set both at once: Gentle (95 / 5) tidies the extremes, Punchy (85 / 15) adds snap, Poster (70 / 30) is a graphic look. Each channel versus Brightness decides whether colours can shift when they clip. Show clipped areas paints blown pixels red and crushed pixels blue so you can inspect a photo; switch it off before downloading unless you want the diagnostic image.
What is the difference between clipping and contrast? Contrast stretches the whole tone curve, so every value moves a little. Clipping leaves everything inside the limits untouched and slams only the values outside them to pure white or black. It is a hard cut, not a curve.
Why do colours shift when I clip the highlights? In Each channel mode red, green and blue are clipped independently. A bright orange (255, 160, 40) with the limit at 60 percent becomes (255, 255, 40), which is yellow. Switch to Brightness mode if you want clipped pixels to go neutral white instead.
Can I use this to check exposure? Yes. Turn on Show clipped areas and set the highlight limit to 98 or 99 percent: anything painted red is already blown in the original. The same with shadows at 1 or 2 percent for blocked blacks. Reset before you download.
Is this the same as Threshold? No. Threshold turns the whole image into two tones from a single cut point. Clip keeps all the mid-tones as they are and only affects the extremes, so a photo still looks like a photo.
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