The current thinking of exposing to the right of the histogram means if you overexpose just a little, you’ll be able to recover highlights, and have more detail and less noise in the shadow areas. There are so many reasons for shooting RAW, but correcting errors in exposure and saving images that otherwise would be ruined is one.

When you have images without detail in highlight areas and shadows, clipping on the right side of the histogram for highlights or on the left for dark areas, you can still make these images sing.

With A2.0, highlight (and shadow) recovery have been much improved with the inclusion of some new sliders. With 1.5, when you wanted to recover highlight detail, you used a combination of decreased exposure and moving the highlight slider to the right.

Now, a third slider has been thrown into the mix and it’s very effective. We now have a recovery slider, engineered specifically to restore detail to areas that look completely white. With blown out highlights, you can see from the histogram that data is off the graph in the highlight areas on the right, it’s gone.

But not forever. Sliding the recovery slider to the right, you can almost magically bring back detail and since the recovery slider targets only these bright areas, it won’t darken the image overall. Watch as the histogram comes back, no longer clipped as you move the recovery slider to bring back highlight detail. The exposure slider will also return lost highlight detail but it will affect all tonal values in your image, not just the bright areas.

We were always able to see where details were lost in the highlights in 1.5, with "Highlight Hot Areas", with the shortcut, Option>Shift> H.

A2.0 has been improved to not only show the hot areas with a red mask, but also let you see the shadow areas that have gone black, with a blue mask. Unlike the shadows slider which lightens all dark areas, the new black point slider resets the black point of the image, and all other tones are remapped accordingly.

Just as you see the hot spots disappear with the recovery slider, the blue underexposed shadow areas can be reduced with the black point slider, which targets the dark shadow areas.

What's nice is the new Aperture incorporates clipping overlays. If you hold down the command key when using the exposure, recovery or black point slider, a blue or red overlay pops up showing you areas that need adjustment to salvage detail.

In preferences (preferences has had a major facelift as you will see, more on that in future posts), you can make the clipping overlay gray by checking the “monochrome” box for clipping overlay. I tend to like the monochrome clipping overlays finding them easier to see, less distracting. What’s nice is even if you choose to see the monochrome clipping overlays, whenever you view both highlight and shadow areas that have no detail, Aperture 2.0 automatically goes back to the red for highlights, blue for shadow areas overlays.

Of course the Highlight/Shadow sliders are still here in the new version. The Highlights slider target the light areas in the image and makes them darker, but won’t work on blown out highlights that are the domain of the recovery slider. The shadow slider brings back detail in the dark areas,

If you click on the "advanced settings" triangle you can finesse your images with more subtle changes, increase contrast in the mid tones and color correct, which often become necessary to restore saturation and contrast after using the shadow/highlight sliders.

These tools are amazing, but I would you suggest you minimize their usage except when you really need them. The less is more approach I think yields better images. Remember, there are times when no detail in the dark shadows or blown out highlights in back lit scenes for example, work best. With the advent of these new tools, many people think that retaining detail in all shadow and highlight areas is always the way to go.

Overuse of these amazing tools lead to a lot of images that look unnatural when the shadows don’t go dark, and even when there is detail, there is often more noise in the detail and less contrast, which just doesn’t look good. So don't be afraid to leave parts of the image in the black or as pure white, if that's how they look best. As precise as the histogram and overlays are, they are no match for your artistic vision when it comes to manipulating your images.