How can I 'mimic' the Highlights-slider in Lightroom?

Anything obvious I have overlooked?

This slider is used to recover detail in the highlights of a photo. You will not be able to get detail out of completely blown out areas - there must be data there to recover for this slider to work.

A very useful tool.

terry helped out by locating one of our early testing images.
Take a good look at these and notice the original has the front all muddy.
In order to clear that, we had to increase Fill light while holding the sky.
The second image is with exposure, Fill and Highlight (HDR) Detail Recovery

Fred

I trust you have heard of Edward Scissorhand!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94yyfWy-KI

I was captivated by the landscaping and artistry of this structure and grounds.

One doesn't more permission than that of Terry

fred

If the goal is to "have lots or pretty looking sliders" then LR does okay with that, but in many cases, sliders don't do the job as well.  Highlight recovery is a good example.  In LR, you drag the slider while eyeballing areas of the image, guessing whether or not you've recovered enough of the highlights.  In QU, you simply mark the area of highlights you are trying to recover, and it recovers the specific highlights you are working with: no guesswork or eyeballing.  When trying to recover highlights, you are already looking at a section of the image that needs highlight recovery.  It might be one area in clouds or the tip of a bird's feather, so just mark that in QU and you're done: it examines the area and recovers as much detail as possible.  No need to "slide and guess" (and ultimately end up just short of the goal most of the time).

Another good example: they even use sliders to adjust horizontal or vertical print size (what they call "cell size"): dragging the corners of the actual print or picking from a list of standard (or user) sizes is much more appropriate.  While they do also allow you to drag corners of prints to size, they don't rearrange other prints to fit on the page when you do resize one print, leaving you with more work to do on other prints on the same page to move them out from under the one you just made bigger, align them manually, etc.  So LR has plenty of sliders, but they're not thinking about the end game: ability to easily arrange and print multiple photos at optimal quality.  So in QU, if there's a slider, it means a slider is the most appropriate tool for the job (levels for example).  If there's no slider, it means another tool does the job better.  I don't put a slider on everything just because I think "sliders are trending".

Mike