RAW Files- Am I missing something here?

I was messing around with some gel/speedlights last night and decided to test some stuff out. I took this picture and checked my histogram on the my display and made there sure there were no extreme highlights or shadows and there were not. No highlight alerts were blinking and nothing going off to the right or left of my histogram. So... then I bring it into DPP and look at it and it looks fine. Then I open it up with Photoshop CS3 and I do get highlight alerts. Of course I know how to tweak things to get the highlights backed down, but I is there something I am missing. Why does one does the camera say it is ok and DPP doesn't look too bad but in PS things are all blown out? Here is what I am talking about.

Perhaps its just that its only the blue channel that's a bit blown. You should be able to recover that with the 'recovery' slider?

Different RAW converters will treat the file differently. The DPP software will apply a picture style (that is embedded in the file or you can change it) ACR may apply one as well but usually not the one imbedded but a default that was set up. There will be may other defaults as well.

People will spend a fair bit of money on alternative converters because they like them better.

From the histogram it is only the blue channel that is out and several different adjustments will bring it back down. Recovery is the best if you like everything else about the conversion.

Dpp is not displaying the individual channels like ACR is...Same reason why it is best to use the RGB histogram in camera rather than the Luminosity.

Dpp and Luminosity histogram show an average of the channels.

Blue 255 Red 245 Green 235 will give you an average of 245 even thou the blue is Blown out

neumanns wrote in post #8707556
Dpp is not displaying the individual channels like ACR is...Same reason why it is best to use the RGB histogram in camera rather than the Luminosity.

Dpp and Luminosity histogram show an average of the channels.

Blue 255 Red 245 Green 235 will give you an average of 245 even thou the blue is Blown out

Neumann's citing the difference between an RGB histogram and a Luminousity histogram is a valid point and there is also another factor. In comparing those two histograms you are comparing oranges and apples. The DPP histogram is not a true histogram of the RAW data, it is derived from data taken from an intermediate step in the conversion workflow, after demosaicing and White Balance correction but before the Picture Style is applied. On DPP's second (RGB) tab there is a predictive histogram, in other words, what the histogram of an exported RGB image will be, should you choose to export with the present settings. The ACR histogram is also predictive, so a more logical comparison would be between the two predictive histograms. Be sure, however, that both programs are using the same working space since both histograms are color space corrected.

P.S. In regard to Neumann's point, the Luminousity histogram is not computed from a simple average of the channels, but rather according to the formula G=59%, R=30%,B=11%, so you can see that the blue channel contributes relatively little to the result.