We all know exposure warnings that a digital camera offers: If shows which parts are so bright or dark that there's no more distinction towards even brighter or darker areas possible. Meaning that those areas can't show any more detail. And that's a limitation of the recording feature of the hardware, i.e. of the sensitivity range of the sensor.
That's all clear.
Now, what puzzles me is that Lightroom keeps creating such warnings when I change an image's exposure. E.g. like this: I open the "Histogram" and "Basic" panes, turn on the overexposure warning in the histogram (click on the top right rectangle) and then move the Exposure slider to the right. That soon leads to areas becoming totally white, and the overexposure warning kicking in.
This makes no sense to me, as here those are just numbers now, and there's no limit to the dynamic range of the numbers, right? I would expect that the editing software can work with endless dynamic range, and only when I apply this to a output medium, i.e a printer, monitor or whatever, I need to choose the available range of that medium, and then either clip the range or compress it.
But here, Lightroom appears to tell me right away that I'm outside of some range, but which range is that, exactly?
Background: Let's imagine I have a display medium that can handle a wider EV range than what the camera had. Now imagine I have a picture that contains the sun, all overexposed, due to the camera's limits. I would now want to use an image editing software to manually put more "detail" into this img area of the sun, raising the brightness there for better effect, because my out medium could handle that additional range. How would I accomplish this, if a tool such as Lightroom apparently already would clip my range at that point?