HOW it WORKS RECOVER HIGHLIGHT Detail
Discover how to restore colour and detail to overexposed highlights using Digital Photo Professional
01
EDIT IMAGE
Click the Edit Image button to access extra image-editing tools, such as the Histogram window, so that you can analyse the photo’s exposure problems with more precision.
02
HISTOGRAM
The histogram in our annotation displays a more balanced range of highlights, midtones and shadows for the edited version of the image than in the histogram of the unedited image (below). Here, we can see that the brightest pixels at the right of the graph are peaking far higher than the midtones in the middle and shadows on the left, indicating that the highlights are very overexposed.
03
LEVELS
Your photo’s tones are measured in a range of levels that run between 0 for pure black and 255 for pure white. If you place the cursor over part of the photo you’ll see the precise level of the sampled area. Here we placed the cursor over an overexposed white highlight in the image, which gave us a maximum level of 255 for the Red, Green and Blue channels.
04
CLIPPING RANGE
The Highlight/shadow Warning enables you to see the brightest highlights as patches of red. You can then adjust the tone-tweaking sliders to reduce the presence of these clipped patches and restore missing tonal detail. You can adjust the threshold to display a wider range of highlights with a red clipping warning. Pixels with a level between 192 and 255 can be designated as overexposed. In our example we chose a clipping threshold of 240.
05
BRIGHTNESS
Reduce the amount of overexposed highlights by dragging this slider left.
06
MIDTONE LEVELS
Drag this vertical bar to the left to remap the midtone’s input levels to a lighter output level, reducing the amount of clipped shadows.
07
HIGHLIGHT LEVELS
This bar controls the strength of the highlights. Drag it right to reduce highlight brightness. Here we’ve dragged it slightly left to make sure that our processed picture still has some bright highlights.
08
HIGHLIGHT SLIDER
This slider selectively targets and adjusts the brightest highlights without altering shadows or midtones. Dragging it left claws back lots of missing highlight detail.