Clipping (photography)

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Example image exhibiting blown-out highlights. Top: original image, bottom: blown-out areas marked red

In photography, clipping is the loss image information where a region of a photograph is brighter than the capabilities of the imaging system, or outside the color gamut of the space used to represent the photograph. It is an instance of signal clipping in the image domain. Bright clipped areas are sometimes called "blown-out highlights". With digital cameras, the clipped area will often turn to pure white and will not contain any detail. For example, it is not unusual for a bright sky area to be clipped to white.

Clipping can occur in the image sensor, where it is called saturation; or at the analog-to-digital converter (ADC); or in the processing and rendering to a standard color space. Depending on where clipping occurs, and on whether raw data are still available, the clipping may be repairable.