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Highlights processing in C1 vs. LR

During the rainy Christmas holiday I got the chance to dig more into Capture One and Lightroom editing. I found a deliberated over-exposured image on my hard drive and started to recover the image by decrease the exposure value to -2 in both Lightroom and Capture One. The way the two software processed the image surprised me a lot. The sky is more like black and white during recovery in Lightroom while in Capture One the colors and details are recovered very well. What is your experiences with highlight-recovery in the two programs?

Capture-vs-Lightroom.jpg

After some processing in Capture One and Photoshop the final result is like the picture below. The full process can be seen on my webpage, unfortunately in Norwegian language:

Bilde_A1.jpg
 

GrahamWelland

Subscriber & Workshop Member
I am extremely biased but I have to say that when it comes to getting the very best from any supported RAW file, including "filling in the blanks" with images blown out on one or two channels, Capture One really does the best job IMHO.

I also find find that extreme highlight/exposure recovery in ACR tends to drive the highlights to a silver/grey as the channel interpolation seems to be less able to recover data than C1. That said, at the extreme C1 will eventually give up too.

I can't speak to the specifics of the recovery algorithms used by C1 vs ACR but phase one seem to do a better perceptive colour recovery to my eye. Now I'm not saying that it's accurate, just more pleasing to the eye.
 
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Amin

Active member
In general, I've found LR better than C1 at recovering highlight detail. Otherwise I prefer the results I get from C1.
 
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