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areohbee
areohbee
Legend
June 3, 2011
Released

P: Highlight *Detail* Recovery

  • June 3, 2011
  • 17 replies
  • 717 views

First I'd like to say how totally stoked I am that Highlight Recovery is working so much better than it used to - thank you, thank you, thank you...

Second, the recovered highlights still lack detail and are flat - the recovered highlight tones tend to be compressed. If I have the time, I often use local adjustment to lower exposure a smidge and contrast a lot to bring out more detail in the highlights, instead of recovery. (Note: clarity only works in the mid-tones).

Fill Light is magical - brings out detail in shadows in a very natural and beautiful way. Highlight recovery however - not so much.

So, this FR/Idea is to bring out more intra-highlight detail when doing recovery.

It is my understanding that Fill & Recovery both use masking to keep from compressing midtones while expanding darks & lights respectively. As of Lr3, this works *very* well. I'd just like to see some contrast reduction applied in the masked highlights to bring out tonal detail in the highlights. This is essentially what I do now manually using locals, but its painstaking. As long as the mask is already active to isolate the highlights, why not use it to spread out those highlight tones?

Bonus Idea: Allow additional adjustments to be applied by user to both shadow masked and highlight masked regions, so user could manually control not only contrast, but hue and such stuff...

PS - If you like this idea, don't forget to click the '+1' button below.

    17 replies

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    areohbee
    areohbeeAuthor
    Legend
    June 3, 2011
    Butch, sometimes its enough to shoot for the highlights and bring up the fill, but sometimes that's not enough. TK made some important distinctions (below) about the two functions of highlight recovery: bringing them in from the great beyond (clipped), vs. pushing in-bound highlights leftward. Both functions are important, but I've been talking mostly about how to enhance detail of highlights that are already in bounds (de-compressing/separating highlight tones). Its often tied in with recovering blown highlights, but not necessarily.

    PS - Fill works great up to say 30 or 40, but at 50 or more the results can get pretty unnatural... and of course if you push too far with underexposure in the camera you end up with overly clipped shadows. So, its very advantageous to be able to push from *both* ends: fill *and* highlight recovery. Unfortunately right now highlight recovery isn't holding up its end of the deal as well as it could, in my opinion.
    areohbee
    areohbeeAuthor
    Legend
    June 3, 2011
    Ever since I discovered the hue twists, I used decreased exposure too, to recover highlights (or switched to linear profile). - literally converted almost my entire collection to be highlight-recovery free. The hue twist problem has since been solved but as you've so eloquently stated, that's only part of the problem.
    B
    Butch_M
    Inspiring
    June 3, 2011
    Perplexing for sure ... first you compliment Adobe on a wonderful job for properly handling detail using the fill light adjustment ... then lament the need to add detail in blown highlights ... to me the solution is simple ... expose for the highlights, extend the dynamic range using the fill slider ... that way you aren't using an algorithm as a crutch, forcing the software to create an unknown from clipped channels , but enhancing actual recorded image detail ... simple really ... and it could quite possibly be available as such by design ...
    F
    FeedbackCommunityMember
    Inspiring
    June 3, 2011
    I very rarely use highlight recovery because it typically produces flat, grayish areas that stand out almost as much as overly bright areas. Often, it is not even possible to use split toning to get some colour back into the areas flattened out by highlight recovery.

    I usually bring the exposure down and then tweak the tone curve.

    I feel highlight recovery should have a "healing brush" aspect to it. It should try to use information from the context to replace blown areas with ones that blend in nicely.

    I think higlight recovery has two functions:
    1. A convenient way of tweaking the top end of the tone curve (for highlights that are bright but not blown out).
    2. A repair function for blown highlights that have one or more colour channels clipped.

    Currently I don't find it convincing in either of the two functions.
    It doesn't attempt colour recovery and if there is masking at all it seems too weak as sufficient amounts of higlight recovery often also have an adverse effect on less than bright tones. The image then looks flat.
    areohbee
    areohbeeAuthor
    Legend
    June 3, 2011
    When you got a 15 stop scene and a 12 stop camera - you have two choices:
    1. Compromise.
    2. HDR
    (and of course sometimes there is photographer error)

    But we digress - this idea is about bringing out *existing* detail - that which you *can* bring out using the local brush, if you know what settings to use and have the time...

    PS - One of the most common disappointments people have when coming from NX2 to Lightroom is less highlight detail. This happens for two reasons:

    1. NX2 uses profiles more like sizzling-badger's (and Adobe's camera emulation profiles) and less like Adobe Standard, which I love in many respects but part of its personality is to sometimes overbrighten upper midtones and lose highlight detail.

    2. Nikon relies on Active D-Lighting to maintain highlight detail.

    It is my hardly humble opinion that Adobe could stand to do some things to enhance highlight detail - this is just one idea...
    M
    Mark Sirota
    Known Participant
    June 3, 2011
    See the related idea: Local contrast adjustments that are actually localized
    B
    Butch_M
    Inspiring
    June 3, 2011
    I've always worked under the impression, the best method for rendering highlight detail is to not over expose the highlights to the point the sensor cannot record the highlight properly in the first place ... rather than request that my RAW converter software create something from nothing to render the detail that was my responsibility to protect during the capture phase ...
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