First, I solemnly swear I'm not expecting LibRaw to process my RAW data! I am trying to do my own RAW processing and LibRaw has wonderfully extracting the RAW data for me :)

I also recognize this forum isn't for RAW processing techniques, but there are many experienced people here so I'm hoping you all can point me to some resources that I can educate myself regarding the topic. I'm specifically interested to learn about different highlight recovery techniques.

I've done my data processing (astrophotography alignment and stacking) and want to save the data (which also works). Before saving I apply the white balance color scaling and, as is expected, my highlights come out magenta. I recognize this is because of the scaling of clipped data which I need additional processing to correct.

I'm planning to go through the source code to learn how LibRaw does the highlight recovery in dcraw, but if anyone has any resources that are more theoretical in nature I would love to read through them.

Thank you!

P.S. Every time I search online I just get a bunch of videos/tutorials of how to do perfect highlight recovery in Lightroom or blah blah software which obviously is not what I'm looking for.