Why are these lights blown out?

Bayer-Z28

Did a shoot of my buddy's car this past weekend and I'm wondering why all of the lights are blown out? I've tried different ISO settings and it didn't alleviate the problem. Did it in both RAW and JPEG. Look at the garage lights on the upper left of the pic.


And any suggestions on this pic would help a lot. I'm getting kind of lost on how to make this really pop. I cranked the saturation up and it seemed to bring some of the color back from the original RAW format. It's an HDR shot, although I'm not sure if it was needed. I just didn't want any shadows. I do all my work on my laptop, so I'm not sure how it will look for the rest of you.

adbsgicom

Because they are very, very bright. If you really need to douse the lights, underexpose another frame (keep the framing the same -- use a tripod), and then merge them together. Other alternative is to expose for those lights and have a bunch of stobes set to brighten everything else in the foreground (since you will be underexposing the car by a ton).

Bayer-Z28

^ I did... This was an HDR shot with three exposures layered. But I suppose I could have taken the burn tool to em.

Gonna try that now, but the reflection coming off them almost looks like it was bouncing off the polarize I wasn't using.

Yeah, the burn tool kind of fixed it, but I'm still not happy with those sections of the pic. I supposed I could have paid more attention to that BEFORE I merged the darn pics..

adbsgicom

I haven't played with HDR in any meaningful way (other than a few feeble attempts at using the CS4 tool and then throwing away the horrid results). There are some HDR gurus about that could answer the question regarding the lights better in that respect.

r3t1awr3yd

Personally, I would have either moved closer to the car or pulled it up closer to where I was shooting and used the parking light as a light source to light up the car. With it in between light sources, getting the car exposed correctly and the lights exposed correctly is darn near impossible without either HDR or big honkin strobes much closer to the car.

Bayer-Z28

How do I just merger two pics? Still just use the "Merger To HDR" feature? I have two other identical pics I want to merge because it will fill the dead spots in the road.

adbsgicom

If all the tones are right, you can just make two layers and then work the opacity on the upper layer with a mask.

pward76

Why not just clone stamp them out? then lightly burn the parking structure surface beneath them if you want.

If you shoot it again, I would stick a strobe behind th e car to highlight the top from the background