Highlight Tone Priority

[neuroanatomist]

Neuro, if the converter defaults to just boosting by a stop, and there's no real penalty to boosting shadows on modern sensors, doesn't that mean it gives you an extra stop of possible highlight recovery, essentially for free?

Raising the exposure by a stop will just re-blow the highlights, you'd have to lift just the shadows to 'recover' the highlights.

Manually ECing means you'd need to adjust each and every one your images back up a stop to get them normal, even if the highlights would not have blown, on the off chance if might save a rare shot. Using this feature would give you normal looking images by default, with the potential to claim back blown highlights during RAW conversion. That does seems useful, if not life-changing.

If I was going to go that route, I'd just set a default profile that included a positive exposure adjustment of a magnitude matching the negative EC on the camera settings. No need to 'adjust each and every image' since they'd all be adjusted automatically for me, and if I wanted to recover blown highlights I could drop the exposure down and lift the shadows.

For me, this is a bygone issue. On a DSLR you had to take your best guess to expose for the highlights or chimp the exposure )maybe with 'blinkies' after the shot and reshoot (if you could). With mirrorless, you see the final exposure being captured in the viewfinder, you can even see a live histogram before you take the shot.