Recovering highlights
HarveyMushman
Registered Users Posts: 550 Major grins
I should mention I use an ancient edition of Photoshop. 5.5, I think it is.
Anyway, can anyone offer advise on recovering some detail on my boy's face? Harsh Fall sunlight and a distracted one-armed photog . . .
I've done nothing to the image since tripping the shutter. My PS doesn't seem to have a shadow/highlights button. :dunno
Anyway, can anyone offer advise on recovering some detail on my boy's face? Harsh Fall sunlight and a distracted one-armed photog . . .
I've done nothing to the image since tripping the shutter. My PS doesn't seem to have a shadow/highlights button. :dunno
Tim
0
Comments
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam
http://www.mcneel.com/users/jb/foghorn/ill_shut_up.au
A significant area of 255,255,255 pixels.
Moderator of the Technique Forum and Finishing School on Dgrin
If it helps you add to your "feature set", download Gimp (a free photoshop like program). I don"t use Gimp but know people who do. It's pretty robust and has tons of devotees worldwide.
www.gimp.org
Here's a tutorial for recovering highlights (some of the steps might also work with your current PS 5.5)
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Blown_Out_Highlights/
I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself.
Edward Steichen
That GIMP tutorial basically shows that you have to darken the blown highlight since it's hard to paint over neutrals in Photoshop (like blacks or whites) so that you can modify it. In Photoshop that means isolating the white part in the channels, and making it dark by using a variety of techniques.
However, you can restore some of the color by converting to the Lab color space, picking a skin tone that has color, and creating a new layer, and then paint over SOME of the white parts carefully to add a bit more skin tone. Since you have Photoshop 5.5, you can try to clone in some texture (but make a duplicate of that area first in another layer so that you can experiment and redo it if you need to).
But next time, try to avoid blowing headlights.
Well, there is hopeless and then there is hopeless. No, you can't recover detail that just isn't there. But you can make the best of a bad situation. I basically just applied the Dan Margulis portrait workflow to this shot with one addition: right after the overlay blend step, I used Dan's blown highlight trick to add some color to the blown areas on the face. As I said, this can't add detail that isn't there, but getting some color into that blown half face makes it a lot more tolerable.
PS: none of this uses stuff you don't have in your old version of photoshop.
Here's a quick reconstruction fix that you can do with your version of photoshop.
This is a simple fix that could be done in a few steps with your version of Photoshop.
1. Using the lasso tool, trace out your boy's left side of his face. Start out from the top of his head and draw a line smack center of his face. You'll be splitting down his hair, forehead, bridge of nose, lips, chin and then outline around his cheeks, ear, hair and back to the starting point.
To have more control, hold down the option key and you can use a connect-the-dots type of method everytime you click the mouse.
2. Once you have traced out half your boys head, hit Command+J (mac) or Control+J (pc) to make a new layer with your selection.
3. Hit the letter V to select the move tool, and then type Command or Control+T to select the transform tool. Right click inside the selection and select the "Flip Horizontal".
Drag the selection so that the ears match up and then drag on the right side pull handles to stretch the image so that it makes a complete face. Once the image looks likes it's lined up correctly, hit Enter to commit to the changes.
4. Yes the image looks a bit abnormal but we're going to fix that. On the bottom of the layers window, click the layer mask button and then select the brush.
Make sure that black is selected as the foreground color and use an initial opacity of about 20% with a soft edged brush. Adjust the size of the brush and start masking out the eye by clicking multiple times until the old one shows through. Now keep tweaking the rest of this layer until you have satisfactory results.
HTH,
Nikos