Highlight Recovery
The reconstruction of detail in bright areas where one or two colour channels have clipped but at least one has not.
Measured in
stops
In depth
When a highlight clips, it rarely clips all three channels simultaneously — a bright sky often saturates blue while red and green still hold values. Recovery infers the missing channel from the surviving ones, which is why a raw file typically yields a stop or more of highlight detail beyond what the camera's JPEG preview showed.
Examples in practice
A sky that looked pure white on the camera screen recovers visible cloud structure when the highlights slider is pulled down.