Use This Lightroom ‘Secret Slider’ Trick for Extreme Shadow Recovery

Retoucher Matt Kloskowski offers this quick and easy Lightroom tip for your mental library: if you ever find yourself with a drastically underexposed photograph, you can use a “secret shadow slider” in Lightroom to try and recover an extreme amount of detail.

Kloskowski writes that Lightroom 5 did away with the “Fill Light” slider that previously existed and replaced it with a less powerful “Shadow” slider. If you want to use extreme recovery of the old slider, there’s a way to do that. Simply choose the older 2010 process under Settings->Process or in the Process dropdown of the Camera Calibration panel.

Using the 2010 process restores the Fill Light slider from older versions of Lightroom, allowing you to do extreme shadow recovery as a last resort:

This probably isn’t something you’ll need all the time, but it’s nice to know the option is there if the Shadows slider just isn’t doing as much as you’d like it to.