I prefer to use the signal splitting techniques mentioned earlier in the thread to do highlight rebuilding, but that can be combined with Highlight Recovery to increase dynamic range if done judiciously. Now, even with Highlight Recovery on Full 16383 Resolve tries to build more highlight detail, even though there is no reserve signal to call upon. Only by enabling Highlight Recovery is that signal information brought back into play, but only though whichever algorithms Resolve uses to rebuild signals.

When the three DNGs are initially brought in the appearance is more or less the same as in ACR, but then using controls like Exposure and Gain to bring back highlight detail it is revealed that this information has been clipped, with Bright 10000 clearly showing the missing information.

In Resolve it is a somewhat different matter. Using the Exposure and Highlight controls it was very easy to bring back the highlight values that got clipped or heavily compressed, so in this case the White Level is really just a convenient guideline for Adobe Camera Raw to map Peak White, and no actual raw data is compromised by altering the metadata. In Adobe Camera Raw they appeared as expected, with Full 16383 slightly darker than Normal 15000 (due to the values being mapped lower to accommodate the additional 1383 values) and Bright 10000 much brighter in keeping with the fact that the lower value is mapped to peak white thereby raising all values accordingly. There were three varieties: Normal 15000, Full 16583, and Bright 10000

I ran some tests with DNGs whose White Level I altered using Exiftool. The reasons for White Level being lower than the full 14bit limit (16383) are well documented - Peak Saturation, non-linearity past that point, magenta cast - but when Highlight Recovery is enabled these extra values come into play anyway. With 5D MkIII footage it is 15000, which is mapped to the value 1.0 in Resolve. I looked into the effects of extending the White Level value in the DNGs metadata.

Free luts for davinci resolve 12.5