How To Recover Highlight Detail Within Camera Raw
https://www.shutterbuggs.com/ - When we talk about the exposure and recovery sliders, you first have the option of using Camera Raw’s auto or default controls, which are just located above the exposure slider.
If we click on auto, you can see that it’s had quite a dramatic effect to your image. Now, the auto control enables Camera Raw to evaluate your raw file, and it attempts to produce an optimal distribution of values throughout your image. As you can see as I jump between default and auto, if you look at the histogram it’s sort of evenly distributed all the information in that file across all values.
And then you can see, it hasn’t done a fantastic job by any means. But, it’s definitely something that you could utilize if you had a large batch of photos that you really didn’t want to spend the time trying to edit and you just wanted to run them through the converter quickly.
Now, the Default link here actually provides a simple way of returning back to Camera Raw’s default settings in the basic panel. Now, these settings can be customized by saving your own preset settings. That’s quite simple to do.
Once you’ve made your settings in the basic panel and adjusted a few things, you can go up to this little icon at the top here and click on it. You’ll notice you have a drop down menu. Now, the options that we’re looking for down here are Load Settings, Save Settings, and Save New Camera Raw Defaults.
What you really want to do is set up your presets. You want to save those settings. Then, you want to load them, and you want to save them as your new Camera Raw defaults. So, every time you open up a new raw file in Camera Raw it will use those presets automatically. So, it’s quite easy to jump back by clicking on the default settings here back to your original presets, which is really quite handy.
Now, the exposure control basically maps out the highlight values in your photograph. It’s really quite a powerful slider. As you can see, you can go from minus four stops in values to plus four stops.
As you can see, it does have a dramatic effect on your image. It should be the first adjustment that you make when concerned with retaining detail in your highlights. As you can see here with my clipping information, all I need to do to retain that highlight detail is actually just move your slider to the left-hand side.
Another way to look at this information is to hold down the Alt key on a PC or the Option key on a Mac, and it will bring up a black canvas primarily. What this shows you is all of the information that is actually being clipped in your photo, which is a really simplistic way of looking at it. The idea here is to basically exclude any other colors other than black to the point where you’re just reducing them until they just disappear. You don’t want to go too far past that point.
By doing this, you can actually see which highlights are extremely blown out and which ones aren’t. You can also do the same for blacks, which shows you a white canvas instead, which you can see here. It’ll show the clipping of black information. But, we’ll leave that for another video.
In some cases, using the exposure slider can retrieve up to an additional stop of highlight information or data in your raw file, which is extremely amazing, especially considering if you went out on site and actually shot an extremely high dynamic range image, and you used some of the techniques such as exposure to the right in order to expose your raw file correctly…
As I’m sure you’re well aware and you’ve read before, with raw files most of the information that is captured is on the right hand side of the histogram. So, in the first stop of information is half of which is normally contained in a raw file. So, for example, with a 12-bit camera you have 4096 levels of information that the camera captures. But, the first stop of highlight information is actually half of that, which is 2048 levels of information, I believe, if I’ve got that right.
Now, the recovery slider is the other tool that I wanted to quickly go over. This is extremely powerful, and I’m going to show you something that I think will blow your mind. The recovery slider itself allows you to recover additional highlight detail without affecting any other areas of the photograph itself.
As you can see here as I move it to the far right, it’s only really affected the highlight values and not too much else, although the mid tones and the shadows have slightly changed. If you look at the histogram as I do that, you can see that the highlight values are the ones that move the most.
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