Using the newer Recovery slider is rather like decreasing Exposure and increasing Brightness. When you increase Brightness, you cause the highlights to compress. This means that highlights will have less contrast. This is clearly indicated in Guillermo's Brightness plots.
Another consequence of compression (beneath the non-linear section of such Brightness curve) is a loss of color saturation.
Unfortunately, the Recovery slider i.e. the combination of Recovery + Exposure do not seem to be free of this effect at all.
For the following test, the Red patch of a ColorChecker capture was driven close to clipping by means of the Exposure slider:
Exposure 2.4, Recovery 0, Brighness 0, Contrast 0, Curve Tab 0, Profile: base matrix.
HSB (pRGB)= 13/
55/98 measured in Photoshop
Recovery was set to 25, then Exposure was raised again close to clipping:
Exposure 3.3, Recovery 25, Brighness 0, Contrast 0, Curve Tab 0, Profile: base matrix.
HSB (pRGB)= 12/
40/98
Now Recovery was dropped, Exposure was reset and Brightness was raised (based on a mid gray for reference) to an overall similar output:
Exposure 2.4, Recovery 0, Brighness 40, Contrast 0, Curve Tab 0, Profile: base matrix.
HSB (pRGB)= 11/
41/99
You may note that there’s a comparable major drop in highlight saturation.
Finally, I’m not using Recovery a lot, just a bit after Exposure, Brightness + Contrast and the Curve Tab are already set.
It’s still among my #1 reasons to edit in Photoshop (see
true recovery).
Peter
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