Automatic highlight recovery - a double-edged sword.

The more I use Lr4b1, the more I love the automatic highlight recovery, and the more I hate it.
It's really not feasible to undo it using the tone curve, and local correction is also *very* challenging.
It's single-handedly responsible for some marked improvements to some of my photos, and just rubbing all the highlight pizazz out of others - no way to win it back using the whites slider.
I really wish I had the option to control it.
Rob

To try and elaborate a tad more:
It's not in the develop module, thus the term "auto" - there is no option to turn it on, off, or otherwise throttle it - it's always on.
It's what's responsible for more detail in your highlights now than you had before - have you noticed that?
Likewise, there is a similar effect at the left end for opening the deepest shadow tones - have you noticed that?
You can see it in your photos when you convert to PV2012 if you have tones at or near the clipping point, and you can also see it in the histogram.
Also, if you turn on the highlight clipping indicator you'll notice a difference in the clipped regions.
It's also noticable when you adjust tones even if highlights were not originally near the clipping point:
Select PV2010, and increase exposure - watch the right end of the histogram. Repeat using PV2012. eh?
The highlights may be a little flatter, but they'll have more detail - usually a good thing. And, yes, as I've said before, and continue to say, I too appreciate the work Eric has done to bring us this improvement. Hopefully that message has not gotten lost in the interest of providing more critical feedback.
The purpose of this thread was to express that in the interest of recovering this detail, there can be a little flattening at the upper end, and this is not a good thing when the sorta glowy unadulterated look is preferred over maximum detail.
If you've never encountered this in your own photos, then you probably won't appreciate it in mine...
And sorry folks, but one can not accomplish the same thing with the whites slider - not even close.
Cheers,
Rob

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Lightroom 4: Played with it for two hours - I am already impressed (highlight recovery)

Great job, Adobe developers. Only the new highlight recovery is worth the upgrade, at least when dealing with Panasonic GH2 raw files. You can get an impression about it, with my post to German Systemkamera Forum. I post the link here, unfortunately, the content is in German, but the included screenshots tell enougjh, you don't need the text:
http://www.systemkamera-forum.de/raw-converter/29051-lightroom-4-beta1.html#post238652
Kind regards
Thomas
P.S.: I posted this originally in the Lightroom 3 forum, before I noticed that a Lightroom 4 beta forum has been established. Sorry for that, but I thought that it is apppropriate to share my very good first impression of LR 4 beta also here. In the future I try to confine my LR4 feedback to here.

Ok, here are the screenshots:
Problems solved:
double contours and highlight revovery
double contours, highlight revovery, detail
blue sky color
Sorry for vthe inconvenience.
Kind regards
Thomas

Highlight Recovery: Two Flavors

This is not about the present hue and saturation issues with highlight recovery, but rather about two flavors I'd like to see:
1. Same as now: Which basically compresses the upper tonal range. This is good for taking the edge off of overly highlighty images, or dulling images that benefit from a dull look - I have some foggy beach scenes where highlight recovery really helps the mood... This algorithm tends to compress the highlights though, which doesn't necessarily enhance detail (it can, since it can literally recover blown-out highlights that would otherwise be 255,255,255, or just bring highlights into the "prime visibility" zone of the histogram, thus more apparent detail despite being more compressed).
2. Highlight Detail Enhancement: This algorithm would reduce the luminosity of the lower highlight tones more than the upper highlight tones. This would compress the upper midtones more instead of the highest highlights. This would essentially be the equivalent of a masked contrast reduction, which doesn't effect the contrast of the low tones - its effect being limited to the high tones. The idea being to separate the highlight tones, rather than to subdue them.
Also, consider adding this to the locals, since the method number 2 would compress upper midtones more which may not be desirable in some areas of the photos. Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing algorithm 1 added to the locals either, now that I think about it...
This would basically simplify what I find myself doing over and over with a lot of photos:
Local contrast reduction of the highlights to enhance detail without supressing overall contrast, and other stuff - see below:
Summary:
- Present algorithm essentially reduces the range of the histogram, by pushing leftward from the right of the histogram, so to speak, compressing all tones, highest tones the most. Good for recovering blown-out highlights and/or or dulling an image for effect.
- Proposed algorithm addition: Separate highlight tones to bring out highlight detail - does not compress highlight tones, but would compress upper midtones instead - the equivalent of global contrast reduction combined with a luminosity mask that limits its effect to the highest tones most.
PS - I assume this is one of the aspects of the Active D-Lighting and other intellgent contrast handling algorithms that aim at enhancing (or maybe I should say preserving) highlight detail without overall contrast reduction. The motivation for this FR comes from the countless hours I spend using local contrast reduction (and other techniques, e.g. tone curve and trying to strike a good balance with exposure, brightness, and contrast) to recover highlight detail (which is already present straight out of the gate when using NX2 in combination with Active D-Lighting).
PS - I'm not trying to claim Active D-Lighting, or other like algorithms are panaceas - they have their own problems, limitations, tradeoffs, artefacts... My proposal is for Adobe to do something even better, whereas what's been done so far in Lightroom, highlight-detail-preservation-wise, is not so good...
PS - I can easily see a little local contrast, aka highlight targeted 'Clarity' being tossed into the mix.
PS - This notion could be adapted for the left end of the histogram as well, although the present fill algorithm is pretty good compared to the present highlight algorithm.
I consider this the single biggest missing "core feature" in Lightroom today.
Adobe: I hope you will consider this for Lr4.
Rob

As I understand it, neither the Shadow nor the Highlight tool recover anything that was not there before. The Shadow tool will give you the impression of recovering detail because it lifts the really dark areas (the [2 2 2]s etc.) up into to a range where you can actually see them.
Most monitors are calibrated (or mis-calibrated) in such a way that anything below a certain threshold (eg, [10 10 10]) looks the same as black as [0 0 0]. Check your monitor at:
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/monitor_black.htm
(It uses an animated image, if the animation has stopped, you might have to reload the page.)
Judging from a quick check with one my photos, stock iMacs tested at an Apple reseller did not show any detail below estimated [25 25 25], stock Cinema displays faired better with maybe [15 15 15]. My Huey-calibrated screen starts at between [1 1 1] and [5 5 5] depending on ambient light (although the Huey should compensate for that fully).
So, the Shadow tool probably simply lifts detail that was at eg [2 2 2] to [10 10 10] where you are able to see it. Real shadow or highlight recovery can only be achieved via the Exposure control as you rightly observed. And using Exposure to recover highlights requires extensive corrections with Levels to get the rest of the image back to where it was before, and usually I do not manage to get it back exactly.
Interestingly, prints at my lab suffer from a similar problem as the un-calibrated screens do. Everything below roughly [15 15 15] appears as black, loosing the details. Even though illuminating the print from the back shows all shadow detail, looking at it in the normal way, some shadow detail is lost.

Lihgtroom 4: Played with it for two hours - I am already impressed (highlight recovery)

Great job, Adobe developers. Only the new highlight recovery is worth the upgrade, at least when dealing with Panasonic GH2 raw files. You can get an impression about it, with my post to German Systemkamera Forum. I post the link here, unfortunately, the content is in German, but the included screenshots tell enougjh, you don't need the text:
http://www.systemkamera-forum.de/raw-converter/29051-lightroom-4-beta1.html#post238652
Kind regards
Thomas

Ok, here are the screenshots:
Problems solved:
double contours and highlight revovery
double contours, highlight revovery, detail
blue sky color
Sorry for vthe inconvenience.
Kind regards
Thomas

Firefox update 23.0.1, no longer automatically highlights the address bar content when I open a new tab.

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What happens is this:
Click "new tab"
New tab opens blank and the text appears highlighted "google.co.uk" for about a quarter second.
Page loads Google and the highlighted text becomes unhighlighted for another quarter second.
Add-on kicks in and highlights the text "google.co.uk" meanwhile I've already begun typing and end up losing the first part of the words, sending me to random web pages and searches.
Why did this change?! Fix it please!

YES!! Thank you jscher2000! You sir are a legend. Thanks for this, changed the newtaburl in about:config, totally worked. Nope, never saw it happening! Speedy machine this one :P Yep, that change completely sorted the issue, just opened about 741 new tabs through the shortcut on my mouse just to celebrate. Thanks guys who helped, no thanks those who didn't.

Automatically highlight the next message and remove the "unread" status

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Highlight recovery comparison

While folks have complained about the noise in Aperture conversions I've seen no comparison of highlight recovery between Aperture and Adobe Camera Raw.
Here's my own.
http://homepage.mac.com/frankpryor/Aperturepix/PhotoAlbum97.html
The highlight in both cases is compensation with the "Exposure" control in both AP and ACR of a factor of -2.
fp

Gary,
I'd read a post where someone had said Aperture's
conversions compared favorably with ACR's. I realized
that I had done a comparison of shadow noise under
various conditions, but that was in 1.01 and I'd
never compared highlight recovery myself. I thought
the results were interesting so I shared them.
We all want this app to fly. I sure as **** wish I'd
waited to see results before I bought it. If posting
results as I find them helps others to make up their
minds about the application and it's suitability for
their needs that's a good thing.
I do agree. But I have to say that from my perspective it was starting to feel a bit obsessive, what with the videos and writing in to macintouch and all. I think you can probably appreciate that people might get riled up when you continue to describe as bugs things that are certainly debatable. But whatever, really. I'd say that Aperture would benefit from someone like you, for whom compositing and layering is a big part of their workflow, being on the beta team.
The first comparison you posted doesn't really
compare highlight recovery because the highlights
aren't blown in the original .
True, but I didn't have much to choose from lying around on the powerbook
Your second example is more useful and quite
interesting. What camera are you using?
20D.
gary

Photo Highlight Recovery Tutorial

Hello,
A week or so ago there was a thread of HDR and more specifically about using
one raw image as the source for an HDR image to recovery highlights, etc. I
promised that I would post a tutorial for my technique on using a single raw
file for highlight recovery. Well here it is:
http://www.screencast.com/users/PC-Review_Online/folders/Tutorials/media/b1e365d8-b94b-497 f-8df6-c7fe21a4894c
Robert

Well, I just did some playing around and I have some major issues with the
Control+Clicking on the RGB channel. It doesn't just select the highlights,
it seems to select nearly all of the image. Take a look at these samples
here. One is from using the color range and one from control clicking on the
RGB channel. The RGB channel option is not acceptable for what my technique
is supposed to do. I have better results using the color range, saving it to
an alpha channel and then applying a small amount of blur to take care of
the hard edges. I am going to play some more and work on refining the
technique but I don't see myself recommending the control clicking method
because it selects way more than just the highlights.
http://www.sonic.net/keesha/channels.jpg
Channels method
http://www.sonic.net/keesha/color_range.jpg
Color Range method
Any thoughts?
Robert

Highlight Recovery in LR2/3

I've been using LR2 on raw images from my Canon 20d for quite a while. I recently got a Canon 7d. Raw images from the 7d with almost any blown highlights can not be recovered - unless I'd like a magenta/green tint in the recovered area. The 20d images could be recovered. I'm only talking about areas that are 1/2 stop or so overexposed here. I note that using Canon's DPP does not result in any strange tints. Using DXO does result in the same tints as LR2. While not overexposing anything is the obvious solution, it seems strange that LR doesn't work as well with the 7d as it did with the 20d. I'm running LR2.7 on a PowerPC Mac OSX10.5.8 but I had a chance to try this on LR3Beta and got the same results. Given that Canon's software doesn't have the problem, it would not appear to be a problem per se with my camera. I also saw an earlier discussion but that was before the 'final' profiles for the 7d were available. Here's an example of what happens(The Highlight recovery slider is 45, exposure: -.33):

From what I understand, the odd colour shifts and banding are a known problem of LR's highlight recovery feature, and the LR team is aware of this. Hopefully it will be corrected in the release version of LR 3.

Disable highlight recovery

I do a lot of work on white seamless, i.e. the background is supposed to be 100% white. However, the auto highlight recovery (as described here http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7481161037/lightroom-4-public-beta-whats-new/2 ) kicks in and pulls down my white to something like 99%. How can I disable the highlight recovery?
Thanks
Oliver

I hear ya olilo123 - Although Lr4's new shadow/highlight recovery is awesome for 95% of my photos, it takes a fair amount of work to undo it in the cases where it's effect is not optimal. In my photography, I find the case comes up more often with the shadows than highlights, when I want them nice 'n black.
As you've noted, simply using the blacks or whites slider is not enough, one also has to fiddle with a few other settings...
Eric: I'm not complaining - the new PV2012 is wonderful! But *if* there were a way to allow even some of us users the ability to selectively shut down the shadow and/or highlight recovery, it would be a nice touch.
Dunno if anyone's given thought to an "Enable Advanced Settings" preference, so beginning users are not troubled with the more esoteric settings...
And please don't recommend just using PV2010 - its like recommending someone walk when they don't like the song that's playing in the car... ;-}
Rob

Highlight recovery questions

1. What actually happens (from an algorithmic point of view) when one goes from 0 to 100? Is any information lost? Is there a con to always going to 100?
2. Sometimes when I do recovery I notice that the original has only a small spot that's "blown" but the moment I move the recovery slider to from 0 to 1 a lot more area get highlighted as blown. I'm not sure why that would be. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Nick

Here's a paragraph from Bruce Fraser's Camera Raw Book:
"The first stage of highlight recovery is to use any headroom the camera leaves by default, which varies considerably from vendor to vendor, with some leaving no headroom at all. The next stage uses Camera Raw's highlight recovery logic to build color informatiom from the data in one of the two unclipped channels. Next, the amount of highlight compression introduced by the Brightness slider is reduced, stretching the available highlight data over a wider tonal range. The final stage is application of a curve to map the midtones and shadows."
Hope that helps. I just chock it up to magic.

Highlight Recovery needs improvement.

I've just been fiddling with the trial version of Capture One 4, and one thing shines when compared to Lightroom. The result form the highlight recovery tool is far,far more natural looking that what can be achieved by Lightroom.
So, the request is obvious.

Lightroom's highlight recovery slider does not only reconstruct the colors, but also affects the tone curve. It 'pulls in' the highlights, so to speak.
I can understand the reasoning behind this: simplicity. If you have a photo that is otherwise well exposed, but has blown highlights, increasing the highlight recovery compresses the highlights and reconstructs blown-out channels at the same time.
Unfortunately, this means that a 'pure' highlight recovery (reconstruction) *without* highlight compression is not available. For better control, I would have preferred to control these functions separately.

Highlight recovery unusable - improvement request

The shadow recovery tool works brilliantly, but the highlight recovery tool is terrible. It does not take advantage of the extra lattitude of RAW files. In RAW images with blown highlights, highlight recovery simply darkens areas that are not blown out, but it does not recover detail in blown out areas, even when that detail is available in the RAW file. Rather than using the highlight recovery tool, I am forced to reduce overall exposure to recover blown highlights. Then I have to use shadow recovery and levels to lighten shadows and midtones to their original luminance. Please, Apple, give us a highlight recovery tool that actually recovers blown highlights from RAW files.

As I understand it, neither the Shadow nor the Highlight tool recover anything that was not there before. The Shadow tool will give you the impression of recovering detail because it lifts the really dark areas (the [2 2 2]s etc.) up into to a range where you can actually see them.
Most monitors are calibrated (or mis-calibrated) in such a way that anything below a certain threshold (eg, [10 10 10]) looks the same as black as [0 0 0]. Check your monitor at:
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/monitor_black.htm
(It uses an animated image, if the animation has stopped, you might have to reload the page.)
Judging from a quick check with one my photos, stock iMacs tested at an Apple reseller did not show any detail below estimated [25 25 25], stock Cinema displays faired better with maybe [15 15 15]. My Huey-calibrated screen starts at between [1 1 1] and [5 5 5] depending on ambient light (although the Huey should compensate for that fully).
So, the Shadow tool probably simply lifts detail that was at eg [2 2 2] to [10 10 10] where you are able to see it. Real shadow or highlight recovery can only be achieved via the Exposure control as you rightly observed. And using Exposure to recover highlights requires extensive corrections with Levels to get the rest of the image back to where it was before, and usually I do not manage to get it back exactly.
Interestingly, prints at my lab suffer from a similar problem as the un-calibrated screens do. Everything below roughly [15 15 15] appears as black, loosing the details. Even though illuminating the print from the back shows all shadow detail, looking at it in the normal way, some shadow detail is lost.

How to automatically highlight / bold words in a JTable cell?

how do i do it?
i have an Object called Data (where toString() is the same as getDataName()).
and i want the JTable to either highlight or bold specific words (using the bold HTML tags) that are present in a SortedSet.
i do not want the dataName to be changed by directly manipulating the Object because the Data Objects were taken from the DB and i need the Objects and the records to be synchronised, and because the words in the SortedSet itself are subject to changes (add/edit/remove).
thanks.

Edit: removed
db
Cross posted
http://www.java-forums.org/awt-swing/47138-how-automatically-highlight-bold-words-jtable-cell.html
Edited by: Darryl Burke

When I highlight a state it automatically highlights all states why?

When I highlight a state it automatically highlights all states why?

I tried sending directly from Acrobat but had the same issue... When I viewed on iPhone none of the highlights show up.
To view it on the iphone, I simply clicked the attachment from within Mail to open it up.

Automatic highlight recovery - a double-edged sword.

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