Why does Lightroom show clipping warnings when I raise Exposure?
Asked 12/21/2011
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2 answers
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In-camera highlight/shadow warnings make sense to me: they show areas the sensor already captured as pure black or pure white, with no recoverable detail.
What confuses me is Lightroom’s clipping warning while editing. If I open the Histogram/Basic panels, enable the highlight clipping warning, and raise the Exposure slider, Lightroom soon shows blown highlights. Since the image is just numbers in software, I expected editing to have effectively unlimited range, with clipping only happening later when exporting to a monitor, printer, or other output.
So what range is Lightroom warning about here? Is it warning about loss relative to the original raw data, or about clipping in the current rendered image/export space? And if I wanted to create a brighter-than-capture look for an output medium with wider dynamic range, how would that work?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
7
There is going to be a limit to the numbers you can use, and absolute white is as far as you can go -- it doesn't matter whether that's a 255,255,255 value in an 8-bit image or 65535,65535,65535 in a 16-bit image (or the corresponding values in a 32-bit image). Once you've hit black at one end and white at the other, you've exhausted the available dynamic range, no matter what the output device is.
Screens, backlit transparecies and projectors can never get darker than "off" or brighter than "all the way on". Paper can never get brighter than the paper itself, nor darker than the darkest ink you can put on it. A high dynamic range might change the distance between black and white (as in a screen with a very high contrast ratio), or it may mean a less visible, smoother transition between levels, but black will still be black and white will still be white. So even though the original bits in the RAW file might still be available for Lightroom (or a Photoshop smart object or similar) to calculate with, it's the output values that matter as far as clipping goes. White and black are hard clipping limits, so the overexposure and underexposure clipping warnings are telling you something you ought to know.
Originally by user2719. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user2719
14y ago
0
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Lightroom’s warning is about clipping in the currently rendered image, not magic lossless “infinite-range” editing.
Image editors still map tones into a finite numeric range. Whether that range is 8-bit, 16-bit, or floating-point internally, there is still a defined black and white for the rendered result. When you push Exposure high enough, tones can be mapped to pure white, so different bright values collapse to the same output value and visible detail is lost.
In practice, Lightroom’s clipping overlay is useful as: “with the current settings, these areas will clip in a normal low-dynamic-range render/export.” It helps you see when your edits are driving tones beyond the available display/export range.
It does not mean Lightroom is destroying detail that never existed in the raw file unless you actually export or commit to that rendering. If the original raw already has recoverable highlight detail, lowering highlights/exposure may bring it back; if the sensor captured the sun as fully clipped, no software can invent real detail there.
If you want a brighter look for a wider-range output, you’d use an HDR-capable workflow/output format. But clipped capture data from the camera cannot be recovered just by editing.
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