Limits of Highlight Recovery With Lightroom and ACR

I love many things about Lightroom, and one of them is that it is very good at highlight recovery.  However, the highlight recovery tool has limits.

Further Experiments with the Nikon D600's Exposure

This post is a follow up to my earlier post about experiments on the Nikon D600's exposure.  In that post my observation was that the Nikon D600 appeared to have a tendency to not give importance to highlights.  For some shooters, the resulting image looks fine.  For me, I like to protect highlights and there were way too many blown highlights even with ADL (i.e. the exposure is too "aggressive").

I posted about this observation on DPReview.  Here is the thread.  I received many helpful suggestions.  I tried out the suggestions, and I will discuss the results in this post, learning a few things in the process.