When I open _MG_5432.CR2 in Canon DPP software, I notice it was shot with picture style "Neutral" and white balance auto and that the highlights on the neck of the bird are clipped.
Changing picture style to "Standard" and white balance to "Daylight" I get
If it were my photo, I would change input white point in DPP from:
to:
And then the dynamic range is increased slightly and nothing is clipped.
Other software might choose dynamic range differently, but DPP does it much like the camera does it if the picture style is "Standard" in the camera. I would suggest not using picture style "Neutral" in the camera if one wants to use the out of camera JPG file instead of the CR2 file.
Other ways to deal with the clipped highlights while editing the CR2 file include
- darkening the entire image
- decreasing highlights
- using curves to darken the highlights
- increasing the dynamic range
I hope some of this helps.
@MNshutterbug wrote:
I'm not really that concerned re: the processing, especially with the highlight that far gone in the Raw files. There is nothing to recover there. I'm interested in why the jpegs retained more data than the Raw files but it doesn't happen every time. I went out and shot a couple ducks and a turtle this morning and the raw files looked much better in a few of the photos but in a couple of them, the jpegs looked better. I'll just learn to live with it. At least one of the files is typically looking good.
One clipped colour channel is often workable. Then you can reconstruct details from the other two colour channels. The problem is when all three are clipped, as you can see to the right, even if it still looks OK.
Your second raw file looks good. Only green channel and not much at all.
