wolfe with an e's blog
Chapter 14: Using curves to restore blown highlight in Lightroom.
The Leica Q2 Monochrom journal.
Up to this point in my photographic journey, I haven’t been a fan of curves. But I’ve found this trick from Scott Davenport to be the most useful way to start the workflow of fixing blown highlights in Lightroom for both DNGs and JPGs.
tl;dr: How turning those burned-out highlights to the lightest shades of gray will make them much easier to work with.
The problem: Once you start messing with sliders, the difference between pure white and the light gray becomes obvious.
The sliders treat pure white and pure black differently than the other 254 tones. They’re designed to shift tones darker or lighter, but leave pure black and pure white intact. The result? As you darken tones to recover highlight detail, the contrast with pure white becomes more obvious. This can cause posterization, a visual step between tones that kills smoothness in the separation of those smooth tones that a monochrome sensor can capture.
Though not 100% accurate, the best way to tell if you have blown highlights is by the histogram. It will have a cliff on the right side as in the image below:
When highlights are blown, there can me much area in pure white. Tweaking the sliders in an attempt to preserve detail of those upper highlights often has the opposite effect: drawing attention to the separation of pure white and light gray. And the extensive tweaking is often at the expense of other tones and the overall look of the photo.
The solution: Turn the pure white to the lightest gray.
By turning pure white (shade 255) into the lightest gray (shade 254 or thereabouts) it becomes a more malleable part of the tonescape. When you do this, you may not even see any change in the white on your screen. Only the histogram will show the effect. Your histogram will go from the cliff at the right above to a smooth taper like this:
This detaches pure white from the slider and keeps the array of tones in the highlights smooth.
Changing shade 255 to 254 in Lightroom for iPad.
When shooting a monochrome DNG there are a lot more tones, but since the histogram is actually read off the JPG preview, the process is the same.
- Tap Edit (sliders icon) and then tap Light.
- Tap the Curves icon. (Since the image is black-and-white, you’ll only be using the default Luminance curve.)
- Nudge the top of the curve in the upper right corner down a smidge. Hardly any drag is needed and you’ll see the results immediately in the histogram.
Now you’ll be able to use the sliders (or curves) to manipulate the tones without a sharp division in the pure white areas.
My take.
When recovering highlights in a DNG or JPG, I now start my workflow in Lightroom with this move. While detail originally lost to pure white is still lost, it won’t look as obvious in your editing. This technique makes edits to images with blown highlights look much more natural.
Like this series? Consider buying me a coffee below.
Photography Leica Q2 Monochrom