Is it fixable?

Thwack

I took this shot a couple days ago while camping with my son's Boy Scout troop. We had a couple of herds of deer visiting our camp site throughout the day. I took a ton of shots, especially in the morning, but most are poorly composed or suffer other problems.

This one is one I really wanted to salvage. It was shot fairly early in the day but the dry grass in the sunlight and heavy shadows mix very poorly.

Is this the kind of shot you have to create by combining two shots (one underexposed for the bright portions and one normal or slightly overexposed for the shadows)?



It shows a bit better in large or original size:

http://thwack.smugmug.com/photos/9164891-L.jpg
http://thwack.smugmug.com/photos/9164891-O.jpg

I know I'd have to remove the white litter from the picture's foreground, but that's easy to do. I'm more interested in potentially fixing the somewhat blown out sunny areas without over-darkening the shadowed buck.

I tried various cropped versions of the picture as well but it very quickly loses its impact if you don't have the hill that the deer is on (which I lose if I crop while keeping a normal aspect ratio on the picture).

If I just trim off the tree to the buck's right, I remove a lot of the highlight problem, but that pushes the buck too close to the edge of the picture in my opinion (and gives an odd-shaped picture which also looks wrong to me).

gubbs

If you have PS CS try the "highlight/shadow" tool in the image, adjustments drop down. I'm at work at the moment so I can't try it for you

Thwack

Thanks. I'll give that a shot. I'm at home, but have PS at work so I can try it tomorrow (well, technically, later today, but you know what I mean).

Thx.

wxwax

Thwack, good news and bad news, IMHO. You shopuld be able to make the deer look very good. But you will never be able to bring back the blown-out areas - they're pure white, there's no detail to be salvaged there, I'm afraid. The only hope would be some incredibly skillful cloning, as far as I can see.

Yes, this is the kind of shot that could use the two exposure method. Dunno if you had a tripod handy when you shot it.

Thwack

wxwax wrote:

Thwack, good news and bad news, IMHO. You shopuld be able to make the deer look very good. But you will never be able to bring back the blown-out areas - they're pure white, there's no detail to be salvaged there, I'm afraid. The only hope would be some incredibly skillful cloning, as far as I can see.

Yes, this is the kind of shot that could use the two exposure method. Dunno if you had a tripod handy when you shot it.

I took a bunch of shots of this buck sitting there, expecting to have some highlight problems. I didn't think at the time of doing the under/over exposure, then recombine (even though I've seen it used here on DG very successfully).

I might get lucky and have a darker shot that I can use for the blown out portions.

Unfortunately, some of the other shots had the white balance set for late night indoor lighting (macro photography of some fly fishing flies I was tying) and that gave some of the spare pics an errie blue tint.

I eventually figured out in the field what was wrong, but that buck was long gone (and the sun was higher/harsher) by then.

In hindsight, yes, I had a tripod available. It was in my truck maybe a hundred feet or so away but it never dawned on me that I should get it. Lesson learned (hopefully)!.

If I can find another shot to use for fixing the blown highlights, I'll post the results. I have to make a slide show of camping pics for the scouts next week (photo summary of the troop's activities over the last six months). Some of the shots will be mine and I'd really like to clean this one up and include it. The scouts had a blast with all the deer in camp all weekend (and the flocks of wild turkeys that came through, the racoons, the big garter snake, etc).

pathfinder

Thwak -

Was this shot with a G2? Does your camera have RAW mode? - I know the G5 and I think the G3 does have RAW. Raw would have given you a lot more help in this image as you could develop two exposures from the same image. Capturing two images with a camera on a tripod also works, but I have not had much luck shooting deer from a tripod - a bipod does work better ( that is a little Hoosier humor there )

Load the original image into PS and give it a whorl - might do better than you think - some of the blown areas may be repairable by cloning from the surrounding leaves and trees. I discuss repairing blown highlights here by patching areas and using free transform to fit the patch to a new area

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

Thwack

Pathfinder,

Yes, it was shot with a G2. I think it has RAW mode, but I don't think I was using that. I'll check the original shot and camera settings to be sure.

That buck sat there for quite a while, so with a tripod, I could've easily gotten multiple shots of at least the background (which is all I really need for fixing things up). His head position might have changed from shot to shot, but the grass, trees, etc would be pretty close even with just a bipod holding up the camera.

Since grass is sort of a random pattern anyways, I don't have to have an exact match from one shot to another. I'll just have to work harder around the edges if it's not a good match.

I also figured out somewhere today that I could replace the blown out grass with shadowed grass. Since you can't really see the pattern of the branches behind the trees, you can't really tell if I create a different shadow pattern in the background.

That might be a lot less distracting as well (vs. the original sunlight portions behind the shadowed buck).

Dang, I'll have to try even more things now.

Thanks for the help.

Thwack

:bash

Let's see how many errors I can pile up on one shot. (sigh)

I have lots of shots of that buck on the hill...but all of the others except the one above were taken from a very different angle.

The shots where I played with exposure settings were all from that alternate angle and most were taken with the wrong white balance selected. I have to figure out if the white balance error can be cleaned up and then figure out if any of the background can be recycled/cloned to fix the blown highlights.

Apparently, I also left the camera on after pulling my pics off so the battery was drained. That means I can't check the settings right now (mostly because I'm too frustrated with myself to walk back to the kitchen where the camera is recharging).

The spare battery is also dead (ran it down during the camping trip).

I know how to use the histogram but failed to on that shot. The G2 is slow to switch back and forth from taking pics to slide show mode where you can check the histogram (why can't I check it immediately after the shot is taken without changing camera modes?).

I have a better camera (brand new A95) but it had to stay home (daughter's b-day party with her friends was the same weekend and had priority...it got the good camera).

The A95 switches modes much faster than the G2 so I would've been more likely to check histograms (well, OK, assuming I remember to do that...I forget about half the time).

If I can salvage this one, it'll be a small miracle.