Extreme Shadow Recovery Trick in Lightroom

Lightroom Tutorials  •  Photography Tips

Sometimes a photograph needs extreme shadow recovery, and Lightroom 5’s shadow slider just doesn’t cut it. Lightroom 4’s old fill light slider can be way more powerful, but how do we get it back? Matt Kloskowski from onOne shows us how to recover details in the shadows using the old process version of Lightroom and how to make a preset so you can quickly compare the old version with the current one:

Switch the Process Version

If you go into your Settings menu and select Process and then 2010, your Develop tool set will look a little different.

Under your Basic tab, you will see the old version of Lightroom’s tools and you can now adjust using the Fill Light slider which was replaced by the Shadow slider in Lightroom 5. You will also see that instead of the Highlights slider, you have the old Recovery slider. Another way to get here is to look under your Camera Calibration tab and choose 2010 in the process version.

Make a Preset

Once in the old 2010 process version, go ahead and slide fill light all the way to the right.

Now create a new preset with only Fill Light and Process Version selected. You could also make a preset in the current 2012 version of Lightroom and move your Shadows slider all the way to the right. Now when you’re considering how much shadow recovery a photo may need, you can take a look at the two presets to see which one would be more appropriate.

You can’t make changes in the old process version and then go back into the current version and continue editing, so you’ll have to decide which version works best for your needs and stick with it for that photo. Have you ever needed extreme shadow recovery? Did this solution work for you?