Last week I was culling through a batch of golden hour landscapes and kept landing on the same problem: skies that had gone completely white. Not just bright. Gone. The kind of blown-out exposure that makes you wonder if your histogram was even trying. My instinct, the same one I had for years, was to flag those frames and move on. But I’ve learned to sit with them longer now, because more often than not, the detail is still in there.

This is a technique I’ve refined over time, and watching this Mark Denney tutorial recently snapped a few things into focus for me in a way I hadn’t expected.

The Histogram Doesn’t Lie, But It Can Mislead You

The first thing Mark makes clear is the difference between highlights that are recoverable and highlights that are truly gone. If you shot RAW, you have a fighting chance. The RAW file holds more data than the camera’s JPEG preview suggests, and that preview is often what you’re reacting to when you call a shot ruined.

In Lightroom, the starting move is straightforward: pull the Highlights slider all the way to -100. That alone won’t fix everything, but it’s the fastest way to see what the file is actually hiding. If some texture and tonal variation starts to emerge in the bright areas, you’re working with something. If the sky stays flat white, you may already be at the ceiling of what the file can give you.

From there, Mark recommends also dropping the Whites slider, which operates on a different tonal range than Highlights. Where Highlights targets the upper-mid tones, Whites pulls back the absolute brightest values. Using both together gives you a wider net. He also brings down overall Exposure slightly when the whole image feels hot, then uses the Tone Curve to add a subtle S-curve that restores contrast without pushing the highlights back up.

Using Masking to Target the Problem Area

The global sliders are just the first pass. Where this workflow gets precise is in Lightroom’s Masking panel. Mark uses a Sky mask, which Lightroom’s AI generates automatically and does a genuinely good job with in most landscape shots. Once the sky is isolated, you can push Highlights and Whites much further negative without affecting the foreground at all.

This is the part that trips people up when they try to do everything with global adjustments. You end up crushing the midtones or muddying the shadows because you’re overcompensating to save the sky. A targeted mask lets you be aggressive in one zone while leaving everything else alone.

After the mask recovery, he fine-tunes with the HSL panel, particularly the Luminance sliders for Blue and Aqua to bring down sky brightness with more nuance than the exposure tools allow. This is less about data recovery and more about the final look of the tones once they’re back.

When Lightroom Maxes Out and Photoshop Takes Over

There’s a point where you’ve done everything the sliders can do and the highlights are still not fully there. Mark is direct about this: if the file doesn’t have the data, Lightroom can’t invent it. That’s when he moves into Photoshop using a luminosity-based selection workflow.

The basic idea is to create a selection based on the brightest values in the image, then use a Curves adjustment layer clipped to that selection to pull those tones down with more precision than Lightroom’s global tools allow. The luminosity selection acts like a mask that’s weighted by brightness, so the correction feathers naturally into the surrounding tones rather than creating a hard edge. It’s more steps, but the result looks more natural than anything you can squeeze out of slider-only recovery.

He also touches on blend modes here, specifically using the Luminosity blend mode on certain adjustment layers to change tonal values without shifting the color. That distinction matters in skies where the blues can get muddy if you’re only correcting in Lightroom.

Where I’d Push This Further

I want to offer one honest caveat from my own editing. The Sky mask in Lightroom is excellent, but it falls apart at tree lines. If you have a landscape with a complex horizon, particularly conifers or anything with fine branching against a bright sky, the auto-mask will bleed into your foreground in ways that are hard to clean up without manual refinement. In those cases, I skip the AI mask entirely and use the Linear Gradient tool with a Range Mask set to Luminance. It gives me control over exactly which tonal values get hit by the correction and keeps the edges clean without needing Photoshop at all.

This isn’t a knock on the workflow. It’s just where I’ve found the biggest friction point, and if you’re shooting in forests or anywhere with organic silhouettes against bright sky, it’s worth knowing before you spend ten minutes wondering why your tree branches look like they were painted by someone who gave up halfway through.

The Part That Actually Changes How You Shoot

The most useful thing about internalizing this kind of recovery workflow is what it does to your decision-making in the field. When you know how much you can pull back in post, you stop chimping every shot and second-guessing your exposure. You expose for what matters most, usually the foreground in landscape work, and you trust that the sky has enough data to work with later.

That’s the real takeaway from Mark’s approach: the blown highlight is a starting point, not a verdict.

Watch the full video for the visual walkthrough, especially the before-and-after comparisons in Photoshop where the technique becomes obvious in a way that’s hard to fully communicate in text. Mark’s demonstration is clear and the progression between tools is easy to follow even if you’re not deeply familiar with Photoshop’s layer workflow.