The photo above illustrates quite well I think how you can recover so much detail from images that are badly exposed. The original RAW photo from the camera (below) has most of Cardiff’s infamous chippy alley in darkness, clearly underexposed, whilst the building and sky in the background is quite nicely exposed except that the highlights are blown out a fair bit.
The second photo above show how you can recover some of the detail in Lightroom – of course if I’d had a tripod and approached this as a HDR exercise there would have been no problem.
The “featured post” on the other hand shows what can be achieved with the new masking functions in Lightroom. The detail is much better, the blown-out highlights are mitigated a bit, but most importantly the underexposed main part of the photos has been recovered and the detail (especially after it’s been passed through Topaz Sharpen AI) is good. Result!!