Skip to main content
1
1ndivisible
Inspiring
December 28, 2016
Question

Recover Clipped Values In Photoshop (Not using Camera RAW)

  • December 28, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1227 views

If I bring in a well balanced image, apply a Black And White Adjustment Layer and boost the Yellow channel significantly, I can see on my histogram that I am now clipping in my blue channel. Assuming I want this effect (very boosted yellows) and don't want anything to clip, how should I recover the yellow channel?

If I was in lightroom I would move the whites slider to the left until I can no-longer see a clipping warning, but how can I do this in Photoshop? I can use Curves or levels to increase contrast, but there seems to be no way to recover values once they are clipped.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 28, 2016

    Convert to a larger color space, like ProPhoto, before applying the B&W adjustment. But if you need to have the file in the original color space, you'll have to flatten before converting back.

    Within any given color space, when a channel clips, it clips. That's the gamut limit of that particular color space. That's a brick wall.

    The white slider trick in Lightroom is just a brightness compensation, pulling back the effects of the adjustment. This works in Lightroom because you have the entire set of sensor raw data to work with. Encoding a raw file into a rendered RGB file throws away a large part of those data, and so you have a lot less to work with in Photoshop.

    1
    1ndivisibleAuthor
    Inspiring
    December 28, 2016

    Thanks for replying.

    I appreciate that within Photoshop we are no longer dealing with RAW data, but there is still an awful lot of data to use in 16Bit Tif. I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of how Photoshop deals with interpolation, but if I am able to effect the image so comprehensively with Curves I don't see why recovering data that has clipped is such a huge leap beyond (given that I am not baking any changes in so long as I stick to adjustment layers).

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 29, 2016

    As I said, convert to ProPhoto. Then add the B&W adjustment layer.

    If you don't think color space matters, try the same numerical adjustment on an sRGB file and a ProPhoto file. A B&W adjustment layer works on the underlying RGB data in that color space.

    Once an adjustment is committed, baked into the pixel data, any channel clipping is permanent. This is true for Lightroom as well, except of course the adjustment isn't committed until you export a rendered RGB file. And Lr's internal workng space is linear ProPhoto, large enough so that you can push adjustments very far before it reaches gamut clipping.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices