In light of Steve Simon's excellent post over on the Inside Aperture blog I thought I would delve into this topic (with a little different twist).

In Lightroom, it is a simple task to recover highlight information in any image using the Recovery slider. Lightroom can recover up to two stops of information in the highlights when shooting raw images. This is one of a number of good reasons to shoot raw. And one of the great features in Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw) is that you can hold down the Option key while clicking on the Recovery slider and the image will go black and show you the blown out highlight areas in red, green, blue or white. As you move the recovery slider to the right, you'll see those highlights recovered. But here I don't want to get too in-depth on recovering highlights as this is a well explored topic on this blog and in many other places on the internet.

Exposure is one of those huge topics when it comes to digital photography that is rarely discussed in detail. And if you shoot raw and know about the "expose to the right" protocol so as to limit excess noise what you may not know is that your histogram on the back of your camera is telling you a fib. The histogram on the back of your camera, even when you are shooting raw images, is showing you a histogram from a processed jpeg. Your camera is not showing you the histogram for the raw image file which is quite different than the jpeg histogram. So if you are relying on your cameras histogram to guide your exposure beware. I highly recommend that you shoot a series of images, download them into Lightroom or Photoshop and check the histogram against the histogram on your camera.

You'll notice rather quickly that even if you have blown out highlights on your camera you may not see blown highlights in Lightroom's histogram. It is a good exercise to see how they correspond so you can know just how far to push the histogram to the right on the back of the camera. Also, as a side note, for skin tones I would use the RGB histograms if you have them on your camera as they are much more informative. For portraits in particular I do not want to have any blown out highlights on the subject because I have found that blown out channels on the subjects skin lead to very strange skin tones - unless of course I am lighting the subject to create hot spots for a creative effect.

Another interesting thing to think about is what I call the "highlight dilemma." Back in the film days I shot pretty much only transparency films, I exposed for my subject and let the rest of the frame fall where it may in terms of shadows and highlights. Since I wasn't processing the film the "blown" highlights were built in. I didn't really think about it that much. When digital came along it seems we were all trying to recover every single blown highlight - or maybe that was just my obsession. It took me a while to realize that blown out highlights are not the end of the world. If you have sunlight reflecting off water, metal or any shiny surface those situations will lead to blown highlights and they should be blown out. Hence the moral is still expose for your subject, control your exposure latitude as much as you can but don't underexpose to recover every single highlight in the camera.

That's it for this week. See you next week here at Inside Lightroom.

Adios, Michael Clark