The overexposed photograph below was initially processed using just the default Basic panel settings in the Develop module.

If the highlights are completely blown out in the original image, you will never be able to recover all the detail completely, but using the latest Process 2012 I think youвЂ™ll be pleasantly surprised at the difference when reprocessing some of your older Process 2003/2010 shots, especially photographs like the one shown in Figure 1. In Figure 1 you can see a direct comparison between working in Process 2010 and Process 2012 on an image where the highlights were burned out (and you canвЂ™t get much more burned out than shooting directly into the sun).ДЇigure 1 This shows a comparison between an extreme highlight recovery in Process 2010 (top) and Process 2012 (bottom). There is also less tendency for color detail to quickly fade to neutral gray and there is better preservation of the highlight detail.

More after the jump! Continue reading belowв†“ДЇree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today. You should now find that highlight detail is rendered better (try reprocessing your sunset photos using Process 2012). Process 2012 has taken this further to provide improved highlight color rendering, which preserves the partial color relationships, as well as the luminance texture in the highlights. But as I have just mentioned, this technology is designed to work with raw files, although JPEG images can sometimes benefit too (but not so much). After that Lightroom also applies a darkening curve to the highlight region only, and in doing so brings out more detail in the highlight areas. The highlight recovery process initially looks for luminance detail in the non-missing channel or channels and uses this to build luminance detail in the clipped channel or channels. How this works is that Lightroom features an internal technology called вЂњhighlight recovery,вЂќ which is designed to help recover luminance and color data in the highlight regions whenever the highlight pixels are partially clipped-in other words, when one or more of the red, green, and blue channels are partially clipped, but not all three channels are affected.

I will often ignore the camera or light meter readings and deliberately overexpose at the time of capture in order to record the maximum amount of levels information and use the combination of negative Exposure and Highlights adjustments when processing the image in Lightroom. It is often better to optimize the camera exposure to capture as much of the shadow detail as possible, but without overexposing to the point where you are unable to process important highlight information. Not all sensors are the same, and with some cameras you do have to be very careful not to overexpose. NOTE: The ability to recover overexposed highlight detail is also dependent on the capture abilities of the sensor. In the accompanying example, I was able to recover one-and-a-half stops of overexposure, but in some cases it may be possible to recover as much as two stops. This is because Lightroom is able to use all of the luminosity information thatвЂ™s contained in a raw file that is simply waiting for you to access it. For best results, you can only use this technique when processing raw images. Although Lightroom can recover the highlight detail on most images, it will have a limited effect on pixel-based images such as JPEGs, PNGs, or TIFFs. You can often recover seemingly lost highlight information by combining a negative Exposure adjustment with the use of the Highlights slider. Correcting an Overexposed ImageДЄdobe Photoshop Lightroom has the ability to reveal highlight detail that might otherwise be hidden. The following is an excerpt from The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Book:В The Complete Guide for PhotographersВ byВ Martin Evening.

Exposure x vs lightroom