How to avoid highlight clipping on sunny days?

[Morgan_Hardwood]

@Andrius

So there is nothing I can do about them now since the details in those areas are lost. Highlights compensation in RAWTherapee or any other software does not work on those areas.

Highlight compression won’t work on areas which are clipped. You may have some success, in fact often quite good results, using highlight reconstruction using color propagation.

See:

Dealing with clipped highlights - an example

In reference to Building Filmulator - #12 by Jud_Johnson Using this raw file from @Jud_Johnson: 009.CR2 (21.0 MB) In RawTherapee it’s enable highlight reconstruction using color propagation, then push up the highlights slider. That isn’t something you need to remember, it’s something you see by looking at the preview and histogram and respond to accordingly. Let’s go step by step: Open the photo, apply the neutral profile (which you normally wouldn’t do because you’d have your own default …

@Andrius

RAWTherapee

RawTherapee.

@Andrius

I was wondering how do you more experience photographers capture in those situations.

If you want to use any auto mode and your auto mode leads to clipped highlights, use negative exposure compensation: -1EV or -2EV.

Click this image twice to view the full thing at 1:1: