Photo Answers

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Highlights versus Whites

Q What exactly is the difference between the Highlights and Whites sliders in Lightroom?

Ray Livingstone

A You can think of the Highlights slider as targeting a much smaller range of tones; and when you use the Highlights slider, you are not adjusting the White Point within the image, which is effectively what the Whites slider does.

The way I work is to use the Whites slider first, which I’ll usually set as far to the right of the Histogram as possible. If there are some brighter areas in the image, like the iceberg image here, it won’t necessarily be pushed to the edge of the Histogram.

If I need to make further adjustments to the brightest pixels within the scene, I’ll then use the Highlights slider. More often than not, this is to recover detail in those brighter areas, so it’s not uncommon for me to take the Highlights slider back to -100. Whether you are using the Highlights slider to decrease