2)Trying to do the same in adjustment layer. First of all: exposure makes everything way too burnt. Then, when I try to clip the bright spots through Levels, it simply turns these burnt areas gray...
By @damianw75349309
One thing you are running into is that many adjustment options, even with the same name, do not do the same thing in Camera Raw and Photoshop.
For example, in Camera Raw, Exposure is a general purpose brightness adjustment, with an emphasis on the midtones. In Photoshop, Exposure appears to be intended for correcting HDR images in gamma 1.0 (linear), not the more common conventional gamma-corrected SDR images. In Photoshop, a conventional overall brightness adjustment is supposed to be done by changing the Brightness option in Brightness/Contrast, the middle Input Level in Levels, or a midpoint in Curves.
Same with Highlights. In Camera Raw, the Highlights option employs a sophisticated algorithm that incorporates highlight rolloff and highlight recovery (using multiple channels if needed). If you adjust the white clipping value in Levels, this is not the same thing at all, because all that does is clip hard, without any intelligence. If you tried to be more subtle about it by shaping the highlight part of the curve in Curves, that would at least be doing some kind of rolloff, but it would not do any kind of highlight reconstruction/recovery, so that still would not match the visual results of the Camera Raw Highlights option.
The closest thing Photoshop has to the Highlights and Shadows options in Camera Raw are the options in the Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights command. But again, it’s not the same code, so you won’t get the same results. The version in Photoshop came first, but I’m not sure if it’s ever been updated, so it can seem like a blunt instrument compared to the more recently and more frequently updated Highlights and Shadows options in Camera Raw.
Also, Adjustment Layers are quite simple; they just take a layer pixel and do math on it involving the same pixel in underlying layers. In contrast, the options in the Basic panel of Camera Raw are image-adaptive, so the visual results of applying a certain value (such as Highlights -20) can vary depending on the content (neighboring pixels) in each image. For example, the Camera Raw Highlights and Shadows options don’t just take each pixel and change the value, they analyze surrounding pixels and can alter groups of them, employing masks and other code to improve local contrast and the visual result. A Photoshop Curves adjustment layer that increases contrast for shadows necessarily reduces it in midtones and highlights, while the Camera Raw Shadows option increases contrast for shadows but automatically masks off other tonal ranges to protect them…fewer compromises.
In short, if you want those adjustments in a Photoshop layer stack with the results that Camera Raw would produce, it would be better to choose Filter > Camera Raw Filter. And if you want that to be editable and nondestructive like an an adjustment layer, convert the image layer to a Smart Object before you apply the Camera Raw Filter. The cost of the Smart Object approach is a larger file size and more complex workflow than with adjustment layers.
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