Restoring Highlights
In order of priority for human perception, the midtones of an image are naturally the most important as they usually contain the most detail, but they are followed closely by highlights, with shadows in last place.
Apart from light sources themselves, such as lamps, which are expected to be super white, we tend to sense something wrong in an image where the highlights are well overexposed. Dense shadows without features are more easily tolerated. This, more than anything, is the basic rationale for exposing to hold the highlights.
Nevertheless, there is a range of post-production techniques for recovering detail in highlight areas. All are premised on there being some detail captured. As we’ve seen, a completely blown highlight ...
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