DPP Exercise 6: Part (ii) : Highlight Recovery

For this part of the exercise I moved from Olympus Studio to Lightroom, as Studio has no highlight recovery slider.
On off-shoot of this was that the tiny amount of clipping visible in the third image (the correct exposure) was no longer recorded as clipping.
The fourth image still showed significant clipping, which was removed by moving the Recovery slider to 18. Although the clipping was removed the level of detail was slightly lower than in the 3rd exposure – although sufficient to make a convincing photo. No image improvement noted at higher levels. In fact above about 75-80 the flat areas facing the camera started to become a rather flat grey.
In the 5th exposure the clipping was only removed by setting Recovery to 100 and Exposure to –1.7. this resulted in an image with a very dark sky, and ugly grey panels on the lighthouse. Also – very little detail was recovered from the highlights – the effect was simply to move pure white to a very pale grey.
Clearly, if the overexposure is not too great it is possible to recover detail from a RAW image, but beyond a certain exposure it is lost forever.
The overall result of this part of the exercise was to make the fourth image, which had a slighter lighter sky than the ‘correct exposure’ the best of the bunch. here is the highlight recovered version: