Camera Raw - Lost black pixels

[WhiteD3]

Are these lost black pixels?

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/8549/clipboard01nty.jpg

[300+]

Probably not. Paint over them with a +1 EV exposure brush and they will probably come back. That way you won't mess with the rest of the exposure too much.

I watched a great tutorial on this last week:
Massive Highlight Recovery with the Photoshop/Lightroom Adjustment Brush | WildShots (http://www.paulburwell.com/blog/2009/08/massive-highlight-recovery-with-the-photoshoplightroom-adjustment-brush/)

Your ACR window seems to be missing some things. Is that elements?

If you don't have an adjustment brush in ACR you may need to create two images, one at the normal exposure, one at +1ev and then use layers to blend them together.

Cheers, Steve

[Cap]

Cant answer your question D3, but sweet looking photo you have there :cool:

[WhiteD3]

Better rephrase the question: What does the iridescent blue/purple represent? This only appears in Camera Raw and once I open the image in PSE all is good.

[300+]

The blue colour is pixels which will clip AT THE CURRENTLY SELECTED EXPOSURE. Red ones are the equivalent for highlights. Perhaps a better way to explain it is raw images contain 12-14 bits. Jpegs are 8. So to take your image from raw to jpeg you need to lose some info. With the conversion you are looking at the default exposure settings say that the blue pixel information will be lost and they will be black.

Move the exposure slider to the right and you will see fewer blue ones, move it left and you get more.

There is 4-5 stops of adjustment in a raw image. So you could take this shot as it is and adjust the whole thing to be +2ev on the exposure slider and it would not look too terrible. Try this on a jpeg and it would be a disaster. This is why you shoot in RAW.

For this shot in particular there are a lot of dark pixels you probably want. So you can adjust the exposure, shadows, curves, etc. to keep them and discard some elswhere from the midrange or highlights to get the jpeg.

The cool thing about tools like ACR is that the exposure range doesn't have to be linear. In your shot you may want to recover 30% of the shadow pixels, but this does not mean that you need to bump 30% from the highlights out of the picture. You can compress the tonal range and appear to keep more brightness levels than an 8 bit jpeg will allow. In effect this is small scale HDR.

Have you tried exporting a single raw file to photomatix? it takes an exposure of -2, 0 and +2 from the same raw file to make the HDR.

Cheers, Steve