Highlight Recovery:
Highlight recovery was the why I started developing RAW converters in the first place. Much effort was expended to make the highlight recovery routines in RAW Photo Lab the best available. RAW Photo Lab makes sure all of the highlight data your camera captured is available and converted. Here are some real world raw image conversions. In many cases "ruined" images can be saved.
| RAWHide's Highlight Recovery | Typical Highlights from "bundled" software or in camera jpeg |
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Some Background:
Very often there can be 1 to 3 extra photographic stops of highlight detail present in RAW files compared to the jpeg image produced by the camera. Unfortunately this extra highlight information is thrown away, or "clipped", by the in-camera jpeg and many raw converters. One reason for throwing away or clipping this data is because our cameras can capture more levels of brightness then our computer displays and or output devices can reproduce. In order to display all of the brightness/highlight detail available the image must usually be reduced in contrast. This reduction is often great enough that the resulting images look dim, dull, and lifeless. Some raw conversion programs do allow you to recover and use some or all of this data, but the highlights must be compressed in brightness in order for the overall image to look good. RAWHide's results can be as natural looking as highlight areas in comparable film images.
Another factor leading to clipped highlights has to do with White Balance scaling. This scaling causes the clipping of highlight data to happen at different levels for each color. Some programs that try to recover this data either only recover up to the lowest value clipped or just leave the values clipped resulting in blue or pink overtones in the clipped areas. RAWHide's advanced algorithm actually reconstructs the clipped data using reasonable assumptions derived from the data of the unclipped channels.