Blown Out Sidelight?

cgmcdonald

Does anyone have any tips or tricks of how to deal with blown out sidelight that gos across a persons face...have tried burning and dodging...exposure mods to selected area, and even the graduated filter tool in lightroom2...none of these seem to be working for me..any ideas would be great!

pathfinder

Charles, were your original files shot in RAW? If they were, I would start there, and try to recapture the blown highlight data by backing off on the exposure slider and increasing the highlights slider

If the files are 8 bit jpgs, then if the highlights are fully fried in all three channels, you will get no love. If one of the channels still has data, that can sometimes be blended back into the image in the blown channels to try to rebuild the image. Jpgs can be run through Adobe Camera Raw v4+, but the repair of poorly captured jpgs is vastly less than in RAW files.

I wil be honest and say that if my images need that kind of repair, I delete them. But I am working for myself and not a client.

Hopefully one of our readers here will offer a more optimistic suggestion for you.

I found l some links that may be of help

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21648

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2220

If there is no detail in the are that is blown, you can select the blown area via Quick Mask with a very soft brush, choose a nearby area of appropriate color to use for a color, and then paint with a brush in that color with a soft brush in Color Blend mode. That will add the color into the blown area - but not real good if you need detail as well.