Can anyone help with this picture - overexposed?

Northern Monkey

Hi there

Took a few photos today, at a local skatepark, I thought this one was going to be really good, as it looked good on the screen on the back of the camera, however, on my computer screen, it looks rubbish



It was taken as a raw, here... http://www.ghfoto.co.uk/images/IMG_3774.CR2 . I've not tried processing raw before, so where do I start?

Cheers

Geoff

Richard

Hi Geoff,

The link you gave doesn't work (404, not found). If you can send it to me via email, I'll take a look, but don't expect miracles--it looks badly blown and not very sharp either. What did you do to create the jpg that you posted?

Cheers,

colourbox

You can study the technique called highlight recovery.

BillyVerden

My Try
Thought i would give it a shot.

nikos

Working with the RAW file will yield much better results.

Quick fix for the JPG:
1. Duplicate layer and set to Multiply
2. Convert to Lab, duplicate layer, select the L channel and use the shadow highlights to bring back some info in the shirt & clouds.
3. Add a curves adjustment layer and increase the contrast on the person
4. Convert back to RGB & save.

Northern Monkey

try this link to the raw file. I'm not having much luck with anything today

http://www.inosys.co.uk/IMG_3774.CR2

The Jpg was created by the camera, I was recording in JPG + RAW, so I just re-sized the jpg

nikos

Another reason to shoot RAW
I took the exposure down to 4 stops to get as much detail out of the clouds as possible. I worked on a 4 image pseudo HDR (jpgs from the RAW file) in 16 bit. I also added the sun rays coming out of the overexposed opening of the clouds.

Gotta love RAW files!



and here's the ORIGINAL

Northern Monkey

Wow. Thats Fantastic. I think I need to read up on using RAW a bit more.

BinaryFx

Northern Monkey wrote:

Wow. Thats Fantastic. I think I need to read up on using RAW a bit more.

This is one area where RAW really comes into it's own - highlight recovery. Highlight detail can be rebuilt into other clipped channels if it exists in one.

Presuming Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom), the links below focus on highlight recovery:

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_hilight.pdf

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=highlight+recovery+with+acr

That being said, it can be amazing what one can do with a JPG or TIFF from the camera, if one really has no other option. The A or B channels of LAB being a good place to look for the contrast differences that one can blend with say hard light mode into the composite RGB original (one may need to perform colour component noise/artifact cleaning first to make these noisy channels usable). Sure, not the same or anywhere as good as what is possible with RAW, but one can do better than the original in many cases.