Design Center Tutorial
Correct an overexposed image in Photoshop Lightroom
Recover highlight details
In the example shown here, I was able to recover three quarter stops of exposure, but in some cases it can be possible to recover up to two stops of exposure. It is often better to optimize the camera exposure so as to capture as much of the shadow detail as possible, but without overexposing to the point where you are unable to process important highlight information. I will often ignore the camera or light meter readings and deliberately over-expose at the time of capture in order to record the maximum amount of levels information, and use the combination of a negative Exposure and a positive Recovery shift when processing the image.
- The photograph shown here was first processed using the default Basic panel settings in the Develop module. The histogram shows quite a bit of clipping in the highlights and you can see how there is very little detail in the sky. A histogram like this can appear disconcerting, until you realize that there is a lot more information contained in the image than you realized. Although Lightroom can work its magic on all images, it will have a limited effect on pixel-based images such as JPEGs or TIFFs. For best results you should use this technique when processing raw master files.
- The highlight recovery can be achieved by applying a combination of a negative Exposure value combined with a positive Recovery adjustment. If you drag the Exposure slider over to the left you can effectively recover at least a stop worth of information, maybe even as much as two stops in some instances. The downside is that you will usually end up making the overall image darker. But when you combine this with a positive move with the Recovery slider, you can soon highlight information that would otherwise have been clipped.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, check out the following resources:
- Photoshop Lightroom Design Center
- Keep your images organized by using keywords, by Scott Kelby
- Boost an image’s saturation, by Martin Evening
