The Organizer ­ Managing Your Photos | Step-by-Step Projects Technique: Using Camera RAW Lab to Restore Detail in Overexposed Photos This shot of a horse's head is overexposed by around one stop. If you'd shot this as a JPEG you might be able to recover the lost highlight detail in the front of the horse's head and the sky in the background, but with only 8 bits per channel of pixel information the chances are the image would begin to look harsh and contrasty before you recovered as much detail as you'd like. Making the exposure corrections in Camera RAW Lab gives you much more scope ­ you can recover more detail without causing the kind of image degradation that editing pixels inevitably results in. Remember, what we're doing here is simply interpreting the raw data to give us a more acceptable starting point. Once the corrections have been made you can output the image as a 16-bit RGB file. Then, there's nothing to stop you making further improvements in the Full Editor or Express Lab.