Does anyone else hate Lightroom's Recovery slider?

[Rajah Sulayman]

I can't help but wonder if I'm using it wrong, because Lightroom pros like Matt Kloskowski swear by it and use it all the time in their post, but whenever I use it I hate how it comes out. It does bring back some detail in highlights, but at the expense of contrast, and it mucks up a lot of colors, too. It's especially bad on flesh tones, which seem to shift when I use the Recovery slider.

Has this been anyone else's experience? It's not so bad when working on black & whites, but for color photos it tends to do more harm than good.

[FormElement]

I find that it's better to fix these things in curves. Open up your curves adjustment, switch to the red channel, and pull the far white end down (literally) until your histogram registers the reds all the way inside. Do the same again for blue and green. This will pull the color detail in without affecting the luminance of the whites. You can then do the same with the RGB combined just until you like it. This is adapted from a trick taught to me by a professional print photo editor, which uses levels, but lacks the ability to recover highlights.

It is my understanding that the recovery slider does something similar, pulling the off histogram detail in, but automatically, and without the control you get in curves.

EDIT: Bummer. You can't do this in LR can you? I just opened it up and it's not an option. I use Aperture, which is a slow dog right now at v3.1 but has WAY better workspace and editing than LR. I am going to see if you can do it in ACR.

EDIT AGAIN: Shoot. I got spoiled. ACR doesn't do this either.