How do i drop the blown out area out here ?

gus

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gluwater

Have you tried Image>Adjustments>Shadow/Highlight?

Or how about exposing for the highlights in RAW and then also expose for the rest of the shot and combine the two exposures?

the first one is easier though.

gus

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USAIR

Gus you might try here
I had some sucess doing this

Fred

BigAl

Gus, I've just had a look at it, as one possible way to do it would be to add a layer, and then darken it, add a hide-all mask to that layer, then paint the darkened areas back on the blown areas. Unfortunately, it looks as though there's no detail at all in the blown areas

gus

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Sam

Gus,

Send me the full file if you like, and when I get home from work today I'll see what I can do.

Sam

jfriend

Three choices

Humungus wrote:

Im ready to move up a gear here guys...fella is wanting to buy this shot & i really should do my best to fix it...with some help.

Nice action shot, btw.

After looking at the file in Photoshop, there is no detail at all in the blown area on the pants (it's all 255, 255, 255). So, shadow/highlights does not help. Since it's JPEG and not RAW, there's nowhere else to go to look for detail. So, here are your choices:

• Don't sweat it. The customer wants the photo for other resasons and likely won't even care about the pants.
• Darken the blown area. This won't add detail, but will make it less of a focal point in the photo. I did this in a minute or so by sampling a nearby color of pants (which is just a gray), creating a new layer, set the brush opacity to about 25%, loosely painting over the blown area, then setting the blend-if setting on the new layer to only blend if the underlying layer is really bright. This limits the area you just painted to only replace the really bright areas and saves having to make a detailed mask or selection.
• Darken and then try to manufacture some detail in the pants. The options for manufacturing detail are to try to find some other photo you can clone/copy from, add some form of texture in PS, manually paint some shadow lines/texture/wrinkles.

Personally, I would go with either the first or second option and then leave it at that.

wetsands

jfriend wrote:

Nice action shot, btw.

After looking at the file in Photoshop, there is no detail at all in the blown area on the pants (it's all 255, 255, 255). So, shadow/highlights does not help. Since it's JPEG and not RAW, there's nowhere else to go to look for detail. So, here are your choices:

• Don't sweat it. The customer wants the photo for other resasons and likely won't even care about the pants.
• Darken the blown area. This won't add detail, but will make it less of a focal point in the photo. I did this in a minute or so by sampling a nearby color of pants (which is just a gray), creating a new layer, set the brush opacity to about 25%, loosely painting over the blown area, then setting the blend-if setting on the new layer to only blend if the underlying layer is really bright. This limits the area you just painted to only replace the really bright areas and saves having to make a detailed mask or selection.
• Darken and then try to manufacture some detail in the pants. The options for manufacturing detail are to try to find some other photo you can clone/copy from, add some form of texture in PS, manually paint some shadow lines/texture/wrinkles.

Personally, I would go with either the first or second option and then leave it at that.

.....



not sure you can recover it all..the lighting looks pretty harsh and the dynamic range of the camera sensor just can't deal w/ it...

try adjusting a new black pnt (ie on the rider's r glove.. then lower the curve,, i tried input=255 output=250 (highlights).... the lighting and the shadows look more natural and yeild a natural depth to the image and the sunstruct rider now pops against the darkeer background of the shadows...

gus

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BigAl

Gus, this tut on RetouchPro may help you as the recipe seems fairly straight forward.

gus

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Mike Lane

Give Lab a chance. There's a discussion about how to recover blown highlights here.

CatOne

Humungus wrote:

Thanks for all the imput here guys...i will sit with it open & try all your diff advice. Sam my biggest prob is that i shot it as Jpeg...too many to process as RAW. Thanks so much for the kind offer but im going to sit this one out by myself & see what i get...

I'd have to comb around to see where you lie on the Mac versus PC side of things, but I will say... sorting through 1000+ RAW files a day is exactly what Aperture is designed to do, and to make very quick work of.

RAW and JPEG are effectively identical in the tool, but you have the extra latitude with RAW. Might not be able to recover something that's blown (I mean, if you're 255 255 255 in substantially large areas there's nothing you can do), but you start with 12-bit images and not 8 so there's more room.

For all the crabbing about initial image quality with Aperture... you're REALLY going to have to stretch to find someone who complains that it's not effective at ~1000 shots/day workflow. It's GREAT at that.

gus

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DoctorIt

Gus, I'm here to give you the easy answer - best bang for your buck. I'm sure some of the other techniques may work better, but this will take all of 3 seconds.

Shadow/Highlight (yes, I know it looks fake)

but the trick is to apply the tool until the blown out area looks right, then use the history brush (going back one step) to only apply the shad/high fix to the affected area only.

CatOne

gus wrote:

CS2 does the same...from what ive experienced, maybe better...its not the ability of the programme to handle the work...its the operator not wishing to thus i shoot these events in Jpeg.

That's what I don't understand. If working with JPEG and RAW were identical (as they are with Aperture), what is this "operator not wishing to..." to do?

With CS2 there are 2 steps... RAW converter + Photoshop. With Aperture (and, really, Canon's DPP for example) there is only 1 step. There is 0 speed advantage to working with JPEG versus RAW file with Aperture.

Not necessarily trying to sway you, just saying, I don't know what the difference would be to the shooter, other than RAW files are about 2x as large (maybe 3x) on your CF card.

gus

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