That's a good example, Paul. Running the PS eye dropper over the seats
almost all pixels have channel values of less than 255 - they are close,
above 250, but not 100% blown out. As you demonstrate, even that little
bit of a difference make it possible to salvage the highlights. If all
three channels were at 255 all that could be done would be to make the
pure white a shade of grey. (If you clip the histogram in the levels
tool so the seats are pegged at 255-255-255 (8 bit per channel file, of
course) recovery is then impossible.) Looking in levels again - there
really is very little clipping of the histogram at either the high end
or low end, so you actually nailed the shot well enough to have a
recoverable image.
Mark
On 11/13/2013 3:29 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote:
I don't know that this proves anything. But Boris asked to see these in support
of my contention that I have been able to salvage blown out highlights on K-5
RAW files. Shot this pic at high noon from a ladder with the sun overhead.
Didn't bother to think that the dash was shaded and the almost white seats were
ablaze with light. Don't know what the difference was in stops, but it had to
be considerable, probably in excess of 14. In any case I had to work with the
RAW rendering and subsequent dodging and burning, but I salvaged a pic that
ended up in the magazine. A reshoot was not in the cards, as the car and its
owner were long gone before I saw how bad I had failed here. One of these id
the RAW opened with the default settings and saved as a jpeg. The other is the
tweaked final image. Not hard to tell them apart.
http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=17598155&size=lg
http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=17598156&size=lg
Paul
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