One small discovery in using Lightroom that has really changed things for me.
Ever since the program came out I’ve had problems with the ‘Recovery’ slider which you can use to ‘recover’ image highlights – areas of the picture that are too bright to fit on the histogram. If you load any image and slide this slider from 0-100 you will see that although it does shift the highlights down, it also alters all areas of the histogram, and that with higher values you get very dull-looking highlights.
So I try to use only very low values of ‘Recovery’, if any at all, usually reducing the level set by the Auto-tone that’s part of my development preset. This usually leaves large areas marked in red as being overbright (that setting you toggle with the ‘J’ key.)
Sometimes you can get rid of these simply by reducing the Exposure Value, but of course that will usually make the image too dark. But while Auto-tone often seems to over-egg the ‘Recovery’ it generally seems to soft-pedal on ‘Fill Light’, and increasing this can both sort out those blue blocked shadow areas and brighten up the picture . And if necessary you can brighten up a bit more with the ‘Brightness’ slider.
The I had what in retrospect seems a blindingly obvious idea (and it’s probably mentioned in all those books on using Lightroom I’ve never quite got round to buying because I know I’d never get round to reading them.)
Often if the ‘red’ areas are just in the sky or other easy areas I’d simply attack those areas with the selective brush tool, usually using a value of around -40 for exposure. But this sometimes brought the problem of giving obviously visible boundaries, and in skies sometimes some very artificial looking cloud edges and poster-like effects.
The obvious answer was to use a brush set to both decrease Exposure and increase Brightness, and after a little experiment I found that sets of values like -40E, +25B or -50E, +35B did more or less as I wanted, bringing in over-cooked highlights while the rest of the histogram stayed more or less unchanged. Because it has zero effect except on very light values you don’t need to worry about applying it carefully, and can use a broad brush, applying it several times to the same area (with a K, K to turn it off and on again) if necessary. It all seems too good to be true.
Of course no kind of magic can get back the really over-exposed, where you have over-saturated the sensor and there is no detail, but I have rescued a few shots which I’d thought were impossible. In more extreme cases it may help to add a little ‘Contrast’ and ‘Saturation’ to the brush as well.