513 Messages
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11.1K Points
Sat, Jun 4, 2011 11:46 AM
15
Lightroom and ACR: Heal Mode for Highlight Recovery
It would be great if "Highlight Recovery" had a heal mode which would attempt to use the context of blown areas to recolour them.
Highlight Recovery seems to be useful in two scenarios:
1. Highlight detail is present but current exposure, tone curve, etc. settings make them appear washed out.
2. At least one colour channel is clipped.
For case 1., it should be sufficient to apply a tonal mapping at the highlight end, perhaps combined with a mask that prevents the effect from spilling over to mid-tone areas. I guess this is how HR currently works. Ideally, it should be the inverse of "Fill Light" (i.e., use a mask) but unfortunately, the results don't look like that.
For case 2., HR should not just pick a neutral grey, but attempt to use colour information from the context to recolour areas for which accurate colour information is lost.
For instance, consider a blown area on skin, due to a specular highlight. Replacing the area with a less bright, but grey area is not a real improvement. It would be great if an optional heal mode would attempt to recreate the skin colour in the blown area.
I could imagine it to work globally, but maybe the HR tool in heal mode needs to be a brush?
I currently only very rarely use the HR slider because it doesn't create satisfactory results when colour channels are clipped and leads to overall flat looking images when they are not clipped. Reducing exposure and tweaking the tone curve often leads to far better results. This is a shame because just using the slider would be a lot quicker.
Highlight Recovery seems to be useful in two scenarios:
1. Highlight detail is present but current exposure, tone curve, etc. settings make them appear washed out.
2. At least one colour channel is clipped.
For case 1., it should be sufficient to apply a tonal mapping at the highlight end, perhaps combined with a mask that prevents the effect from spilling over to mid-tone areas. I guess this is how HR currently works. Ideally, it should be the inverse of "Fill Light" (i.e., use a mask) but unfortunately, the results don't look like that.
For case 2., HR should not just pick a neutral grey, but attempt to use colour information from the context to recolour areas for which accurate colour information is lost.
For instance, consider a blown area on skin, due to a specular highlight. Replacing the area with a less bright, but grey area is not a real improvement. It would be great if an optional heal mode would attempt to recreate the skin colour in the blown area.
I could imagine it to work globally, but maybe the HR tool in heal mode needs to be a brush?
I currently only very rarely use the HR slider because it doesn't create satisfactory results when colour channels are clipped and leads to overall flat looking images when they are not clipped. Reducing exposure and tweaking the tone curve often leads to far better results. This is a shame because just using the slider would be a lot quicker.
Ideas
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Updated
9 years ago
5
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15
Helpful Widget
How can we improve?
Tags
highlight recovery
gray areas
heal mode
content aware
Responses
rob_cole_2221866
4.5K Messages
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76.3K Points
10 years ago
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rob_cole_2221866
4.5K Messages
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76.3K Points
10 years ago
See related thread: Highlight *Detail* Recovery
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rob_cole_2221866
4.5K Messages
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76.3K Points
10 years ago
PS - Nobody is suggesting it as a *substitute* for better exposure settings (note how I did not use the word "proper"). But it would make an awesome *supplement* for cameras that can not capture full dynamic range (that's *all* cameras).
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tk_images
513 Messages
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11.1K Points
9 years ago
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jinn_leong
78 Messages
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1.3K Points
9 years ago
Here is how I would like it to work - It gets information from pixels around it and information from other nearly blown/partly blown highlights to interpolate a new color that was blown out.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
A better recovery.
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