Highlight clipping

Scene with a range of brightness - using manual exposure - found the exposure setting at which the highlight warning just appeared:

ISO 200 1/90s f/22

Same shot with 1 stop exposure increase:

ISO 200 1/90s f/16

I then worked at reducing exposure by one stop at a time (but as I couldn't reduce the aperture any further than f/27, I had to increase the shutter speed instead) - this still resulted in a small amount of clipping:

 

ISO 200 1/125s f/27

ISO 200 1/250s f/27

ISO 200 1/500s f/27

The differences between the shots that are visible are the amount of clipping in the sky.  Although I thought my first shot was where the clipping was only just appearing, I was surprised to see that there still a small amount as I decreased the exposure.  This at the time was undetectable on my camera, but in the software you can see it.

If I go back to image 2 with the increased exposure and zoom in on the highlight:

You can see completely lost areas of information with a pinkish halo bordering the lost highlight.  Also, the colour saturation around the highlighted area is weak.  I can't see any real areas of white around the highlight clips at this exposure - all the white is lost.

The average exposure fares a little better - there is more distinction between the white and the highlights, plus there is better colour saturation in the grey.  There is however still a pinkish glow around the areas of lost highlights.

The sky I preferred was in the third shot - one stop underexposed, however this left the fore and mid ground too dark.  The solution is to use an N Grad filter to adjust the exposure of the sky.  I did look in my software for the Recovery slider, but could not find it.  But in Elements I found a "smart fix" feature which I applied to the one stop under exposed JPEG to produce this: