What to do with blown highlights in faces?

carmel6942

The following image is of my daughter and I love the picture except for the highlights.



1. What could I have done differently taking this picture to prevent the highlights? So I don't do this again.

2. Is there anyway to fix in photoshop? I have tried but I seem to only make them worse.

Thanks in advance

DavidTO

Cute shot.

Check out The Impossible Retouch. Post there if you have questions (so we keep all the discussion about the technique together).

jfriend

carmel6942 wrote:

The following image is of my daughter and I love the picture except for the highlights.

1. What could I have done differently taking this picture to prevent the highlights? So I don't do this again.

Some options that could be done at shoot time:

• Use a round light shield that could filter the direct sunlight to diffuse it. These are usually collapsible disks covered with some sort of semi-transparent fabric used to diffuse direct sunlight.
• Use a reflector to fill in natural light to a more acceptable intensity compared to the highlights (allowing you to stop down and not blow highlights)
• Use fil flash to raise the level of the shadows so you can stop down and not blow the highlights.
• Avoid specular sun highlights like this with a different position (this one's a duhhh, but I do have to constantly remind myself that it just won't work in a photo even though the eye sometimes thinks it looks neat).
• Expose for the highlights so they aren't blown and fix the shadows in post processing.

carmel6942

Thanks David and Jfriend I appreciate the help. You better believe that I am going to pay more attention to how the sun is hitting my subjects. I was mostly in the shade and I thought that the few holes in the leaves would help with ambient light.:crazy Boy was I wrong, I will be looking into better use of fill flash and using reflectors.

pathfinder

Shooting in the shade is a great technique, but you must be very careful ( as you have learned ) about shooting in dappled sunlight.

It is easy to overlook ( our eyes easily compensate for dappled light ) but darn near impossible to fix nicely after the fact.

I've made this mistake enough to learn to always look for it if I am shooting in the shade of trees or leaves.

The Impossible Retouch can help.