Can I rescue horribly over-exposed pictures?

[GeneralBenson]

Lightroom can save over/under exposed by 2 full stops if you shot in raw I believe.

A popular statistic... but one that leads to many misconceptions. It really depends on just how over-exposed the image was at the time of capture.

Areas that are blown out pure white aren't recoverable under any circumstance... because there is nothing to recover. What will happen oftentimes is that Lightroom will pull back details surrounding the pure white areas, but merely turn the pure white highlights grey (for example, using the Recovery slider). To boot, the areas immediately surrounding the blown out highlight, while admittedly revealing some detail, will exhibit ugly posterization that cannot be fixed. Again, this occurs because there is minimal available data for staging the recovery.

I would agree that Lightroom can save photos that are over-exposed by 2 stops... but a shot can over-exposed a good deal without actually blowing out highlights.

Blown highlights are blown... they really can't be saved.

Correct. The recovery slider in Lightroom can bring thing back from the very edge of blown out, but once they are blown, there's no getting them back. Even if one of the color channels, and sometime even if two, are blown out, but there is detail in the other channels, the REcovery slider can use that info to somewhat rebuild the info of the missing channels. It's very useful for control images with hot spots or uncontrolled highlights, but they still need to have info within them for Lightroom to wrangle the highlights back in.

 

[Babs]

I'm trying to think now what the camera settings were on! The EXIF data is showing as aperture priority at f/1.8 with exposure of 1/4000 sec. The flash didn't pop up or go off.

Thanks for the info on the histogram info, overread. I'm getting the hang of histograms as I've been looking at pics in Lightroom and the histogram comes up automatically, so that's making me understand them a bit more. So yes, I'll have a look and see how to display it on the LCD screen.

I also have a copy of "Understanding Exposure" which got delivered yesterday. I think I should try and read it this weekend!! :lmao:

 

[kundalini]

If a pixel has gone to 255, there is nothing to recover. In Lightroom, you can recover some photos that are greatly overexposed without blowing by using the sliders.

For example, I was on a site visit and just threw the camera to my eye, hit focus and snapped. Didn't even look at the meter, just for the focus dot.

Overread subscribes to the Histogram setting for his LCD display. I, on the other hand, like the Highlights setting. After the snap, I chimped the LCD and saw that most of my displayed image was blinking madly. Of course, then you adjust and watch the meter.

This was the shot SOOC.

Since I took another shot, I was going to recycle the shot, but decided to play whether anything could be salvaged. I tweaked the sliders in Lightroom.

This was the recovery.


At least now the image is useable for documentation.

 

[Overread]

Interesting point Kundalini - I think with Canon the highlights setting you describe (with the blinking highlights) comes along with the histogram only as opposed to nikon its seems which displays the two independently from what you say.

ps you got far more out of that shot than I would have thought possible!

 

[Robin Usagani]

Yeah... I like that setting kundalini. I kept my review setting to that now.

 

[karia]

Such a shame Babs...looks like a great shot in the making from Peacock's work up.

Good question to ask for all of us still willing to learn.

 

[kundalini]

Interesting point Kundalini - I think with Canon the highlights setting you describe (with the blinking highlights) comes along with the histogram only as opposed to nikon its seems which displays the two independently from what you say.!

For me, it is akin to reading a digital clock to know the time instead of looking at an analog clock to see what time it is. Another reason for me is that my eyes are old, I don't like to have my glasses on while shooting (or anything else I don't HAVE to have them) and I find that I usually can't see the image on the LCD while outdoors, but I can see the blinking.

ps you got far more out of that shot than I would have thought possible!

Thanks, I was impressed with the lens correction tool. First time I've really played with it.

 

[DerekSalem]

I actually had a similar situation once at the zoo. For no reason at all I didn't realize I was shooting at f/8 all day. That's usually not a problem except 1/3 of the day I was indoors and wondering why I was at ISO3200 and 1/100 and still underexposed. I felt like an idiot when I realized it. Thankfully, saved most of the pictures since I shot them all in RAW and it wasn't *too* far underexposed

 

[LittleItaly]

Isn't there a way to open your Jpeg files in the RAW editor??

 

[GeneralBenson]

Isn't there a way to open your Jpeg files in the RAW editor??

Yes, Lightroom and Aperture will process Jpegs as well as RAW. But hte advantage of the programs isn't the program themselves (as awesome as they are), it's the RAW format that makes it so powerful.

So yes, you can edit jpegs in LR, but you won't get those kind of results. You'll just get lots of jpeg artifacts if you try to push things too far. WIth a jpeg, all the info the LR is recovering from those RAW images, has already been thrown out, and doesn't exist anymore.

 

[LarryD]

It's always a bummer to lose photos........ But, there are plenty more out there to take...

Av is a great mode to be in and I encourage your use of it... However, to use it properly, you need to always look and set the f-stop to what you want it to be............. Of course, at f 1.8, no shutter will be fast enough to give you proper exposure, and that is what happened here... the camera shot as fast as it could (1/4000), but that f1.8 simply let in too much light...

Outside, on a sunny day, set the f-stop to a sensible f8 or f16, and this will never happen again...........

 

[KmH]

Isn't there a way to open your Jpeg files in the RAW editor??

In ACR yes, but a JPEG has already discarded 80% of the image's original color data, and converted the image into 64 pixel (8x8 pixel square) MCU block (Minimum Coded Unit), that become the smallest image part you can edit.

Additionally, though the image was originally recored in a 12-bit depth(4096 tonal variations) or a 14-bit depth (16,384 tonal variations), JPEG only has an 8-bit depth (256 tonal variations).

JPEG is a final, ready-for-print format, and has very little bit depth headroom for editing.

JPEG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RAW vs. JPEG