Exercise: Highlight clipping.
My choice of scene for this exercise was the white cliff area at Kingsdown near Dover. The white cliffs and lightly clouded sky gave me my highlight areas and the shrubbery at the foot of the cliffs the dark area.
I set up the camera on a tripod and took the first image at f4 and 1/200 sec. At this point the highlight clipping warning was showing some loss in the sky. I then took images at one stop over and three more progressing down from the first at one stop increments.
This is the first image. The sky, although very pale, shows little sign of lost detail. Beneath it is the screen shot showing the that shows the area of lost detail.
The third shot down is the same picture after employing the recovery slider. It took only 14% recovery to produce a clean image with a surprising amount of further information becoming visible. As I moved the slider to the right the image took on a dull and flat look.
As taken.
Clip warning.
After use of recovery slider
The image below is the darkest version. I applied the curve recovery method from the last exercise and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of detail that was recovered. The histogram had the same fractured appearance.
I had a look at the lightest image and closed in on a part of the cliff that was severely clipped. Use of the recovery slider rendered a great deal of lost information. At 59% all the clip warnings were absent and the lost detail was showing clearly.
The sky area was one area where there was a total loss of information and no amount of recovery changed this.
I could detect no line or edge between nearly white and total white.
I could not detect any tonal change in this set of images although I have detected it in sunset shots where there is was steep change from dark features to bright sun.
The colour saturation was better in the darker images with the one stop more being the best usable colours. Excessive use of the recovery slider desaturated the image in a most unpleasant way.
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