Adobe Lightroom Digital Photography Tutorial - Highlight Recovery

iPhotoCourse.com Photography Tutorials

Lightroom – Recover Highlights, Overexposure, and Colors from RAW

©Copyright 2012 • David L. Tong • http://www.iphotocourse.com

2

Legal Disclaimers, Copyrights, and End User Rights This document can be re-shared provided that no alteration has been made to this original

article.

Originally published on http://www.iphotocourse.com/lightroom-recover-highlights-and-colors-

from-raw/

You may not claim this article or modify this article for republication or distribution.

Copyright Notices 2010-2012 iphotocourse.com - All Rights Reserved

No portion of iphotocourse.com or its associated sites may be reprinted or modified in any

form without prior consent.

http://www.iphotocourse.com/lightroom-recover-highlights-and-colors-from-raw/

http://www.iphotocourse.com/lightroom-recover-highlights-and-colors-from-raw/



3

Table of Contents

iPhotoCourse.com Photography Tutorials ..................................................... 1

Legal Disclaimers, Copyrights, and End User Rights ................................. 2

Copyright Notices .................................................................................................................. 2

Recover Highlights, Overexposure, and Colors from RAW Using Adobe

Lightroom .......................................................................................... 4



4

Recover Highlights, Overexposure, and Colors from

RAW Using Adobe Lightroom

One key benefit of shooting RAW is the ability to manipulate all of the data available in an

image file. Unlike JPEG, you have a lot more leeway in terms of exposure and dynamic range

adjustments.

Oftentimes, we don’t have the luxury of using grad filters or bracketing, such as portrait

sessions or just casual snaps. There’s an incredible amount of RAW data available even if

your camera tells you you’ve clipped (overexposed) your highlights when you shoot RAW.

We’re going to use Adobe Lightroom’s [check best price] Develop panel for this exercise, but

essentially, it’s identical to Adobe Camera RAW’s control panel in Bridge and Photoshop.

Other 3rd-party RAW converters may very well have similar, but differently named tools as

well.

http://www.iphotocourse.com/adobelightroom



5

First we take a look at our original image. I took this around 930AM here in Singapore in a

bright, clear, sunny day. It’s rather rare for Singapore to have blue skies as it’s cloudy most of

the time.

Unfortunately, dynamic range limitation of a single exposure made the photo look like it was

taken on a bright but overcast, cloudy day (which it wasn’t). You can’t see the blue sky and

fluffy clouds in this photograph.

As you can see, the sky is rather over-exposed and white, with just a hint of blue/cyan peeking near the

left edge. If I turn on the highlight clipping indicator, bulk of the sky has no data. The histogram tells a

similar story.



6

That is deceiving, however, as the RAW file contains a lot more data that the image shows. By using the

right RAW conversion tools, we can recover a lot of ‘lost’ information in our photographs (within reason)

that we could never obtain if we shot in JPEG or other compressed format.

We will be using the HUE / SATURATION / LUMINANCE (HSL) panel mainly for this exercise, you’ll see

how easy it is to recover lost details and colors from a seemingly wasted image.

The HSL panel shows a set of 8 color sliders under each sub-panel. You can adjust the same 8 color

sliders independently for hue (color shade), saturation (color intensity), and luminance (color

brightness).



7

We need to darken the sky mainly, which we know is primarily blue and cyan in color. However,

Lightroom lets you use the target adjustment tool. That’s the little circle at the left corner of the panel.

Click the circle and upper and lower arrows appear around the circle (arrows not shown in the screen

cap below).

Since the photo’s problem is that the sky is too bright, we will be adjusting the settings under the

LUMINANCE panel.

Using the Target Adjustment tool, move the Target Adjustment circle to an area near the faint blue sky

and drag the cursor downwards (reduce value).



8

You’ll see that a lot of the white areas start to reveal more blue values, separating the white clouds from

the blue sky.

To recover more areas around the clouds, we move back up to the exposure/global adjustment sub-

panel and play with the RECOVERY slider. Move the slider to the right until you obtain your preferred

amount of sky details, in this case, I dragged the slider to about +20.

Just like that, a world of difference in terms of sky detail.

If I go further, the image will look a bit un-natural (subjective observation), I’m OK with this. Compare

this sky with the original image and you can see how much more data a RAW file preserves even if the

JPEG thumbnail preview indicates otherwise.

Now you might be asking “why not just use the RECOVERY slider up front?”



9

No reason, you’ll get the same result, but only if you adjust the luminance of the blue/cyan sky as well.

Otherwise, you’ll end up having a pretty flat and grey sky like this (-100 Recovery from the original file)



10

Going back to our adjusted image, I tweaked the SATURATION and LUMINANCE settings for the trees a

little using the Targeted Adjustment tool.

Remember that these are arbitrary adjustments, purely based on how it looks on screen, so use the

Targeted Adjustment tool and play around until things look right.



11

Here’s our final image.

The whole process took less than 2 minutes to complete from opening to final output and it also

represented how the real weather was when I took this snapshot.

If you have a set of images shot at similar settings, just reapply the same HSL and Recovery adjustment

settings and you’re good to go. Another great reason for shooting RAW, simple but powerful stuff.

For more tutorials in photography post-processing and other digital photography tips, visit

http://www.iphotocourse.com

http://www.iphotocourse.com/

Business

Adobe Lightroom Digital Photography Tutorial - Highlight Recovery