Yea that's the first thing I do in every photo. Highlights are always hiding a lot of the contrast of the coral.This popped up as an updated article, so I read it again. This time I noticed that you drop the highlights channel by 100. I tried that and WOW, what a difference that makes. Until now I've been hesitant to mess with much beyond the WB, exposure, and sometimes the tone curve. Dropping hightlights improves most of my coral shots considerably.