Do modern digital cameras recover blown highlights better than older models?
Asked 7/21/2014
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Older discussions often note that clipped digital highlights are hard to recover because once a pixel reaches its maximum recorded value, detail is gone. However, newer cameras are often said to have much better highlight recovery. Is that really true in practice? If so, is it mainly due to improved sensor dynamic range, in-camera highlight-protection features, better RAW converters, or a combination of these? I'm asking specifically about behavior near clipping and whether modern digital cameras handle highlight roll-off and recoverable bright tones better than older digital cameras did.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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On modern DSLRs, the dynamic range increased, sometimes significantly. But there is a theoretical limit to "highlight recovery": If the (digital) value read from the sensor is all "1111" (e. g. the highest possible number), there is nothing that can be recovered, because all pixels which have the max. value are effectively "the same".
A film on the other hand has no real "1111" (highest possible value), so there you can nearly always recover "something", because there are always little differences.
The third thing that comes into this equation is the displayable Range of the file format. If you use an 8-bit JPG, you are quite limited. But usually you can't see the difference, because your monitor also uses only 8-bit. So if you have a 16bit file, you have plenty of values outside of the range that an 8-bit monitor can display.
So, if any, you can use the nowadays greater dynamic range to "compress" the highlights into the space that can be displayed within a jpeg, thus having a "better" highlight recovery.
Originally by user26144. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user26144
12y ago
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Yes, to a point. Modern cameras generally do better with bright tones mainly because sensor dynamic range has improved, sometimes significantly. That means more highlight information can be captured before clipping, so files often allow better recovery near the top end.
But there is still a hard limit: once a pixel is fully saturated and recorded at the maximum value, no software can recover detail that was never captured. In that sense, truly blown highlights are still unrecoverable in digital capture.
Part of the improvement people notice can also come from RAW processing. Better RAW converters can extract more usable tonal detail from data that is close to clipping, especially compared with old software or JPEGs. File depth matters too: JPEG is much more limited than higher-bit RAW/processed files.
So the short answer is: modern digital cameras are better at preserving and recovering highlights near clipping, mostly due to improved sensors and aided by better RAW conversion, but completely clipped highlights are still lost.
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