jloden
All-Pro
- Name
- Jay
Just wanted to share this example of extreme highlights recovery with an X100S RAW file in LightRoom 4.
It's not a particularly good shot, and I was about to trash it in LightRoom anyway when I thought I'd see how it'd fare with trying to recover the utterly blown highlights. Here's the original:
Biltmore by jloden, on Flickr
And here's the end result after pulling it down -2.55 stops in LightRoom and setting Highlights to -42 at the same time. Only other adjustment was my default of Clarity +25 that gets applied on import.
Biltmore by jloden, on Flickr
In my opinion, that is absurd headroom for highlight recovery. I usually won't try to recover anything > 1 stop and even then I feel I'm pushing it. Pulling down 2.5 stops and more without losing all details or color shifting is incredible. Ideally we don't need to recover 2 stops of highlights because we get the exposure in camera, but it's nonetheless impressive and good to know what's possible with a modern sensor like in the X100S.
I also subtitled this "why to shoot RAW" because I always shoot RAW (RAW + JPG on the X100S) and decided to try the same steps on the SOOC JPG file just for kicks. As I expected, the results were pretty horrific. Unfortunately I'd already deleted it before I thought to share, but trying to recover the JPG more than a stop or so resulted in bad color shifting, blurry gray areas of lost highlights, and just generally fell apart. The amount of latitude added by shooting RAW is nearly double.
It's not a particularly good shot, and I was about to trash it in LightRoom anyway when I thought I'd see how it'd fare with trying to recover the utterly blown highlights. Here's the original:
Biltmore by jloden, on Flickr
And here's the end result after pulling it down -2.55 stops in LightRoom and setting Highlights to -42 at the same time. Only other adjustment was my default of Clarity +25 that gets applied on import.
Biltmore by jloden, on Flickr
In my opinion, that is absurd headroom for highlight recovery. I usually won't try to recover anything > 1 stop and even then I feel I'm pushing it. Pulling down 2.5 stops and more without losing all details or color shifting is incredible. Ideally we don't need to recover 2 stops of highlights because we get the exposure in camera, but it's nonetheless impressive and good to know what's possible with a modern sensor like in the X100S.
I also subtitled this "why to shoot RAW" because I always shoot RAW (RAW + JPG on the X100S) and decided to try the same steps on the SOOC JPG file just for kicks. As I expected, the results were pretty horrific. Unfortunately I'd already deleted it before I thought to share, but trying to recover the JPG more than a stop or so resulted in bad color shifting, blurry gray areas of lost highlights, and just generally fell apart. The amount of latitude added by shooting RAW is nearly double.