Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Ed Blagden on January 09, 2010, 05:38:10 am
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Hi
I'm wondering what others think about this. For a moderately over-exposed shot with some areas of blown highlight there seem to be two alternative methods of dealing with this in LR:
- Leave the exposure slider alone and use the recovery slider to eliminate blown highlights. Or alternatively;
- Eliminate the blown highlights by reducing the exposure slider, and then increase brightness to compensate.
Any views about which method is better? Up to now I have been using method 1 but have recently tried method 2 as well. I can't see much difference except that I have noticed that a large exposure adjustment can produce a colour shift so I have to go back to WB to correct.
Am I missing something here?
Ed
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Remember what the two sliders do, apart from simply affecting blown highlights. Exposure increases the brightness values of all pixels in the image, so it works across tones and across the whole image area. Recovery only targets contiguous areas of highlights. Depending on the image, one or other will produce results that better to you.
John
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Hi
I'm wondering what others think about this. For a moderately over-exposed shot with some areas of blown highlight there seem to be two alternative methods of dealing with this in LR:
- Leave the exposure slider alone and use the recovery slider to eliminate blown highlights. Or alternatively;
- Eliminate the blown highlights by reducing the exposure slider, and then increase brightness to compensate.
Any views about which method is better? Up to now I have been using method 1 but have recently tried method 2 as well. I can't see much difference except that I have noticed that a large exposure adjustment can produce a colour shift so I have to go back to WB to correct.
Am I missing something here?
Ed
A similar topic was discussed by Thomas Knoll in Michael's Camera Raw video, CR09_BasicPanel. He talks about setting the white point. One can use exposure to set the white point and then use brightness to adjust the midtones. Alternatively, one can use exposure to set the midtones and recovery to adjust the highlights. He says the two methods are equivalent. In the video, he did not say if he was increasing or decreasing the white point.
If the highlights are blown from overexposure, which linearly increases brightness of the whole image--shadows, midtones, and highlights, use of the recovery tool alone alone would leave the midtones and shadows too light, since recovery affects only the highlights. You could use brightness to bring these down. Brightness affects the tonal scale, but leaves the black polint and white point unchanged. However, use of the exposure control alone should do the job. This control linearly decreases tones over the entire image.
If the highlights are blown because the dynamic range of the scene exceeded that of the camera and the midtones are properly exposed, the use of recovery alone would be proper.
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Thank you both. I have mainly been using the recovery rather than the exposure adjustment to deal with highlights, it is reassuring to know that this is considered OK. What I find interesting is that if I make a major adjustment to exposure (more that 1 stop) then it produces an unwanted colour shift, so I try to avoid that.
Ed