Scott Gomez wrote:
>I was directed to this article on another venue:
>
>http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/highlight_recovery.pdf
>
>Haven't finished reading the entire article (much less tried it) but it
>looks as if Adobe is claiming you can use their "Camera Raw" to recover
>highlights in many cases.
>
>
Actually, you can do that in any RAW converter. There have been many
posts here on the subject. I do it quite commonly in PSCS.There are, of
course, highlights that are just gone in the RAW file too in come shots.
Nothing you can do about that after the fact. But its surprising how
much detail is hiding up there in many shots.
The JPEG engines all have to decide what combination of clipping
highlights and shadows and compressing what's left to use to stuff 12-14
bits of brightness info into an 8bit JPEG.
It's a lot like all those outdoor snaps run through automated printing
with sky of one indeterminate bright color, no blue and no clouds. The
printer has held midtone tonal detail, so all the people will look
somewhat normal, and let the shadows and highlights go. One of the joys
I found in scanning my own film is that most of those shots have lovely
blue skys, often with nice fluffy white clouds in them, on the film that
isn't on the prints.
In the RAW converter, you can make your own, different decisions,
retaining highlight and/or shadow detail. If you do 8 bit output, you
can only keep one or the other or you really compress the midrange
tones, which generally isn't a good plan. With 16 bit output, you can
retain everything the camera sensor recorded. Of course, you can't
display it in a JPEG on the web or print it all. What you can do is
place everything where you want it in the tonal range using tools like
curves, levels, highlight/shadow, etc. before converting it back down to
8 bit.
Moose
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