I am learning dt. Reading the manual, watching videos, and playing with 3.2.1 on my Win10 PC. One area that I am confused about is how to handle blown highlights. There are 2 situations:
Not blown in the raw file, but blown because of my processing.
Blown in the raw file. But there are 3 cases: all 3 RGB channels blown, 2 RGB channels blown, 1 RGB channel blown.
When I have situation #1 there are many modules where I can usually recover the blown highlights. Any insight into the better ways though would be appreciated.
What should I do about #2? I realize that if all 3 RGB channels are blown then there is nothing that can be done. Often when it is just 1 RGB channel or even 2 RGB channels that are blown then something can be done which is often acceptable â if you know how to do it. Using other software I can often do it, but I am confused about how to do it in dt.
From playing around I have found several different modules where it appears they might take care of blown highlights, particularly for case #2:
filmic: scene tab: adjust white relative exposure
recovery tab
basic adjustments: highlight compression
highlight reconstruction
shadows and highlights
There are probably others that I missed. Do people here have any suggestions? I admit that I am a bit confused right now with all these options and without clear guidance about this subject. Maybe I missed documentation on this whole subject?
If you have one or two channels blown, you can use âfilmicâ or âhighlight reconstructionâ to try and reconstruct the texture in the blown areas. âshadows and highlightsâ will only do local adjustments of the exposure (using blurred masks under the hood), which will get you a gray area. Or you can end up with the famous âmagenta highlightsâ if you donât have âhighlight reconstructionâ active.
I found that if Iâm using âfilmicâ's highlight reconstruction, I get better results when I turn off the âhighlight reconstructionâ module.
If you have all three channels blown, only âfilmicâ could help hide the misery, but keep in mind that its highlight reconstruction can get rather slow in more complicated cases.
If you have no blown channels, you just have overexposure in the bright zones. âFilmicâ is very good in bringing that down (but it will compress the tones, of course), or you can use the âtone equaliserâ to bring down the exposure specifically in the highlights (make sure to set up the mask to your liking).
As you seem to be working with âfilmicâ i.e. scene referred workflow, perhaps avoid the âshadows and highlightsâ module, it can give rise to halos when pushed. âTone equaliserâ can do about the same thing without the halos.
Both âfilmicâ and âtone equaliserâ require a bit more work to master and to set up correctly than the classical modules, but I think the results are worth it.
scenario 1: if using the scene referred workflow itâs hard to achieve blown hightlights. So without more information on the used modules itâs hard to give recommendations
scenario 2:
If all raw channels are blown, thereâs nothing to reconstruct - filmics highlight reconstruction just mitigates the effect.
If just one or two channels are blown, highlight reconstruction module with âreconstruct in lchâ can be used to conserve the information. Usefull for blown highlightâs since these usually doesnât contain much color information.
Then filmic is used to bring everything into a decent tonal range, and to mitigate the effect of remaining blown stuff
Forget about using basic adjustment in this case - you need to do the adjustments in the optimum order of the pixel pipe âŚ
In the scene referred workflow if i have to bring the highlights under control after using filmic and exposure, what I do in filmic is a little relative white exposure, then reduce the latitude and sometimes the shadows/highlights balance if required.
The relative white exposure if pushed too hard I find tends to grey the highlights. The latitude and shadows/highlights seems to give much better control without other artifacts
If at the end of processing I still have a few over exposed areas I use colour balance and reduce the highlights. ( I have used tone equaliser for this as well)
For scenario 2 I tend to just use highlight reconstruction and âreconstruct in lchâ and adjust the clipping threshold. If that doesnât work or the area is too big, I chunter to myself, shrug my shoulders, bin the file and make sure next time to take better pics. It just takes too much faffing to try and recover large over exposed areas in the rawâŚunless of course somebody else has a better trick?
