Lightroom: The Exact Order That Saves an Underexposed Raw File

Lightroom can rescue a raw file that looks unusably dark, but only if you approach the recovery in the right order. When you lift a file like this the wrong way, the shadows turn noisy fast and the highlights fall apart.

Coming to you from Christian Möhrle, this focused video starts with a histogram crushed into the left side and visible clipping in the deepest tones. Möhrle’s first move is not exposure, and that choice is the point. He treats noise as the first constraint, since the moment you pull real detail out of near-black areas, the grain you could ignore at normal brightness becomes the main subject. He uses Lightroom’s AI Denoise early so the later tonal moves do not amplify problems he could have prevented. After that, he changes the profile away from Adobe Color to Adobe Standard to ease contrast before doing any heavy lifting in the basic panel.

The exposure move is deliberately limited, because the sky becomes the immediate penalty for being too aggressive. Möhrle raises exposure only until the brighter areas start to look fragile, then leans on the shadows and blacks sliders to open the darker structure without pushing the whole frame into a blown-out look. He also works the highlights slider to pull back detail at the edge of the waterfall and in the brighter sky, where clipping looks especially harsh. Then he brings whites up to reintroduce contrast, but not so much that it undoes the highlight recovery he just fought for. The sequence matters: if you have ever pushed exposure first and tried to “fix it later,” you know how quickly you end up chasing your own adjustments.

Once the tonal range is usable, Möhrle moves into choices that change the feel of the scene, not just its brightness. White balance is handled with a practical target, getting snow to read as snow instead of blue-gray, and he does it by eye rather than turning it into a ceremony. Color is boosted with vibrance and then saturation, which is a reminder that blanket rules rarely survive contact with a real file. He adds texture for bite, then reduces clarity and dehaze slightly to keep the look soft instead of brittle. If you tend to crank clarity to make a recovered file feel “detailed,” this section is a useful counterexample because it shows how easy it is to make rock and snow look harsh.

The masking work is where the edit stops being global damage control and becomes selective rebuilding. Möhrle uses a landscape-style mask to target the cave walls and lifts exposure there further, because those areas can take it without risking blown highlights. He adds structure with clarity and texture inside the mask, aiming for definition in the rock without making it look etched. For the sky, he starts with a broad sky selection, then subtracts with a linear gradient so only the top portion carries the darkening effect, which avoids the heavy-handed “painted sky” look. He stacks radial gradients to create a controlled glow behind the cliffs, then balances it by darkening specific distant rock using a color range mask that he tightens with an intersected brush, so the glow does not spill where it should not. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Möhrle.