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Highlight Recovery
When it comes to highlight recovery, Aperture is a very powerful tool. When I first started shooting digital, I was under the impression that digital exposure was like exposing slide film of old, better be accurate and err on the side of underexposure to avoid blowing out the highlights.
It’s true that if there is no detail captured in the highlights, no amount of highlight recovery can bring it back. But we now know that even when it looks like you’ve clipped a bit on the highlight or right side of the histogram, there is still detail to be salvaged.
So I now look at my histogram on the back of the camera closely, to gage where the pixels fall. I now tend to err on the slight overexposure side, since underexposure results in an increase in noise when recovering shadow detail, and that even pixels clipped to the right, can be salvaged when using Aperture’s Recovery tool.
The Recovery Tool works by recognizing detail in any of the three color channels. Even if there’s detail in one of the three colors, the Recovery tool recognizes this information, and rebuilds it into the other two channels.
You can watch the right side of the histogram move left, and even pixels that were off the chart to the right miraculously come back. The Exposure Slider will also do similar work, but it affects the image globally, darkening all tones as you slide to the left, not just the highlights as with the Recovery slider.
Once the Recovery Slider has done it’s magic, I then turn to the Highlights Slider, which doesn’t recover blown out tones, but darkens the highlight areas where details exist. This is why the tools should be used in concert. Between them, we’ve got a powerful way to bring back lost detail in the light areas and finesse images to our version of photographic perfection.
Recovery and Highlights Sliders at Zero
Recovery 150, Highlights Zero
Recovery 150, Highlights 55
Like with most adjustments in Aperture, I try not to take it too far for more natural results. I can then finesse the image with black point and shadows as well as the advanced controls in the Highlight/Shadow HUD.
Steve - this is a powerful combination for sure! At capture time, I set my camera's histogram to show RGB channels (not just luminance) so I can see if any detail exists at the far right (normally, the Red channel will grab stuff the others don't in my case), and combined with Ap's tools you mentioned, I am able to save many otherwise blowout situations.
IMO, the new Recovery, Definition and Highlights/Shadows tools are some of the best bricks in the stack :-)
cheers,
david
I use DxO Labs software to recover highlights. I find this software more useful for noise reduction and highlight recovery than Aperture. However, I wish I could get the DNG output from DxO to be read by Aperture. Right now, I get an "unsupported format" when I try to read DNGs in Aperture generated by DxO. I'd prefer to use Aperture for everything else, but having DxO and Aperture in the same workflow doesn't seem to be happening.
Steve, Great Post but do you mean "150" for the recovery setting?
Yes Jim, 150 is the recovery setting.
I find myself going for the 'Boost' slider in the RAW adjustment brick some of the time, it can also be used to pull back some of the blown out highlights, quite effectively, if you have it lower by default it wouldnt help you , but if you have it to 1 by default you could try to lower that a bit and see if that helps. (at least it isnt as 'hard/difficult' for my mac as the highlight recovery adjusment)
I think the highlights and shadows brick is extremely powerful. I'm still learning to tweak the radius, tonal width and contrast sliders to get the effects I want.
Suppose you delete your precious picture and you need tem back. At this time you need a data recovery software to recover your pictures back.
http://www.datarecoverymac.org/