add color to blown out areas in LrC?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
April 16, 2024
2 replies
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Lightroom Classic 13.2 MAC OS 13.6.6

Sometimes in photos there are small areas of blown highlights. However, surrounding these areas the color is the exact color to blown highlight should be.

I am seeking a way to 1) select the blown area, eg with object or brush or any other tool and then 2) select the color to be used from the surrounding area and then 3) paste that color onto the selected blown out areas.

I am aware that using the clone tool could be helpful, but soimetimes those blown areas still retain some texture and cloning will lose that.

Any advice appreciated and thanks in advance

macOS

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Conrad_C

Community Expert

If this is a raw file, have you already made sure that you’ve tried to bring down all available highlight detail below clipping, by reducing Exposure and Highlights (locally if necessary)? Also, I have found that for images where it’s appropriate, applying the Adobe Landscape raw profile reduces clipping somewhat.

If you have gone as far as you can with that and there are still areas that are totally unrecoverable by reducing Exposure and Highlights, those areas are so clipped that the values in all channels are the same, so there is no color detail there to recover. At that point it has to go to Photoshop.

In Photoshop the conventional way to handle this is to manually heal or clone, but this problem gave me an idea: Can Generative Fill help here? I used Select > Color Range to select the extreme highlights, then with the selection active I clicked Generate in the contextual task bar. This might take a while because the selection is much more complicated than the usual shapes that Generative Fill fills in. After it generates the three variations, you select the one you like the best. In my example the result isn’t perfect, but it can potentially be improved by using a different layer blending mode. Or maybe what I should have done is make a better initial selection. If the Generative Fill technique meets your requirements for texture matching, it would certainly save a lot of time compared to manually healing or cloning.