# Lr4 Highlights - wow!



## Triggaaar (Jun 5, 2012)

I've only just installed Lr4, and the first thing I've noticed is the huge change to highlights.

I do some white background studio work, where I'm deliberately blowing the background. On seeing the new tool I was immediately interested in the fact that you can increase as well as decrease highlights - I thought perhaps I could get away with slightly less light on my background (as it's a job to manage the light bouncing everywhere) and later blow those highlights with this slider. So I loaded an old image where the background was almost completely blown in camera. On updating to the new process, that white background is no longer blown at all. Strange. I dragged the new highlights slider all the way to the right, and the background is only partly blown.

Not a great start for where you want a blown background, but I thought I'd check out some old images where I wanted to recover the highlights. In 2007 I took some shots with a Nikon D70 of a couple of friends that had just got married. In some of the shots the setting sun looked good, but the brides dress was blown. I had played with the images in Lr3 and Capture NX2, but the dress was un-savable. Cue Lr4 - wow, highlights recovered, dress and picture saved.

So, amazing ability to recover highlights, but (in my 2 hours on Lr4 experience) a tough job to blow them when you want to. Any tips on the latter?


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## johnbeardy (Jun 5, 2012)

Slam up the Whites slider, but yes you are going to have to work a bit more to blow those highlights.


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## Triggaaar (Jun 5, 2012)

johnbeardy said:


> Slam up the Whites slider


Good point   So much to learn.

It feels strange having the blinkies going off in camera and then Lr saying you've lost no detail at all.


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## kbfoot (Jun 8, 2012)

It has been my experience so far that all the amazing---and much appreciated---tone adjustment abilities of LR4 are geared toward a very conservative, Kodak-guidebook/Ansel Adams-ish idea of what constitutes a well-developed photo: Full range of realistic tones, etc.  
That blowing out the white studio background---along with less-common, but wilder tonal distortions---is not favored by the designers is disappointing.   I keep LR3 for that reason.  But as cameras change over time, LR3's functionality will be lost.


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 8, 2012)

The LR3 functionality's still there in LR4 Keith, even for cameras that were new to LR4 - you'll find it under Process Versions in the Camera Calibration panel.

And the blowing out of the white background can be done with the whites slider - they haven't ruled anything out, although it's certainly weighted towards getting better 'average' photos.


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