I'm curious, what did you think the red highlight recovery will add to the picture?
A good question. Initially, I just saw it there and thought it was interesting, as I sometimes do the intermediate images that appear on screen in post processing in Lightroom - eg when you press the alt key while applying sharpening, particularly a mask.
Sitting behind that interest, a few things, which may amount to retrospective justification insufficiently connected to the actual image. It (the red highlight recovery) adds an apparently random touch of color to a black and white image which may get the viewer's attention and provoke questioning, to which there are various possible answers, a couple of which follow. It converts the brightest bits to color and hence "rescues" their brightness by converting it from nothing to something. More generally, it draws attention to the whole business of post processing by stopping it half way and maybe even by suggesting there might be more detail in the non-clipped bright areas which further post-processing might rescue. And so on.
A self-conscious "move" like this, drawing attention to the artifice and artificiality in an image, is very ordinary in the context of modern art practice but in a LuLa discussion forum, amounts to a deliberate modest provocation. The responses so far - your good question and a weakish (IMHO) joke, leave me conflicted concerning the validity of my original comment that Lula might not be the place for this kind of thing. By that, I mean no denigration whatsoever of LuLa or its members. After all, LuLa is for photographs, and this is not a photograph, it is a screen capture from a computer. Or, to put the point another way, it is not about a landscape, it is about the process of making images of landscapes.
I should probably also mention that we were well into the second bottle of wine, and that I have been doing some work on modernism and aesthetics.
