White

lr1811

Hopefully this is posted in the right area...

Using Photoshop, is there a way to greatly reduce the white/blown out areas?

Here is a photo example.

Icebear

Looks pretty gone to me
Where there's no data, there's no data.
That sounded pretty harsh. You may be able to pull back anything that's there with your levels, but I wouldn't hold out too much hope.

Duffy Pratt

To a certain extent, it will depend on your originals. If you shot RAW, there is more hope that you will be able to find some information in the areas that look blown. If what we are seeing is an original JPG, then its less likely that you will be able to get anything, but its still possible. But if the readings are pure white (255, 255, 255), and its a JPG, then the best you can do is either live with it, or build/superimpose some info where there currently is none.

Duffy

lr1811

I did shoot in RAW. I open in Nikon Capture and then PS.

Duffy Pratt

In ACR, if you have it, you could play with the Exposure and the Recovery sliders and see if it gets you any better results. I'm not familiar with the Nikon Raw software, so I don't know what the options are there. If you want, you could post a link to your RAW file and see what others come up with.

Duffy

pathfinder

The shirts as posted above read 253, 253, 253 over large areas - this means there is just no information of significance there.

If you have the RAW file and open it in Adobe Raw converter 4.2 ( that comes with PSCS3 or Lightroom only ), you may be able to dial back the exposure slider, and dial up the Recovery slider until ( IF ) you see improvement in the shirt fronts. That may help.

You may then need a second run through ARC to salvage the rest of the image after dialing back of the exposure to save the blown whites. You then adjust the Exposure and Recovery sliders to improve the rest of the image.

Once you have both images available in Photoshop, you can copy one image on top of the other, and blend them with a luminosity mask, or a hand brushed mask.

arodney

lr1811 wrote:

I did shoot in RAW. I open in Nikon Capture and then PS.

In a good Raw converter, IF you have some data in one of the channels, you can pull back some of this blown out shirt area. Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom using exposure, Recovery and some curves could do it IF you didn't actually blow out the exposure such that you got to full sensor saturation.

Don't try to 'fix' these issues in Photoshop, get it correct from the Raw converter!

LiquidAir

When I am working with a blown out photograph I first recover everything I can from the RAW image. If I have recovered sufficient detail but lost the color from the highlights, I'll bring the image into Photoshop and drop an empty layer over the image set to color blend mode. I then sample the color from nearby areas and paint the color back into the blown out setions. Here is a sample shot I did that with:



This is a single exposure (not a blend or HDR). When I took the shot I pushed the exposure a bit too hard in an attempt to maintian forground detail. After I had worked the exposure and recovery in Lightroom for all it was worth, the brightest part of the sunset was still white. Luckily I had some other shots from the same time that were not blown so I had a reference for the proper color. I added the layer set to color blend, sampled the color from a different photograph and used a soft brush to paint out the white. The end result looked a little flat so I tweaked the transparancy of my color blend layer until I was happy with both contrast and color.

Izzy Garavito

LiquidAir wrote:

When I am working with a blown out photograph I first recover everything I can from the RAW image. If I have recovered sufficient detail but lost the color from the highlights, I'll bring the image into Photoshop and drop an empty layer over the image set to color blend mode. I then sample the color from nearby areas and paint the color back into the blown out setions. Here is a sample shot I did that with:



This is a single exposure (not a blend or HDR). When I took the shot I pushed the exposure a bit too hard in an attempt to maintian forground detail. After I had worked the exposure and recovery in Lightroom for all it was worth, the brightest part of the sunset was still white. Luckily I had some other shots from the same time that were not blown so I had a reference for the proper color. I added the layer set to color blend, sampled the color from a different photograph and used a soft brush to paint out the white. The end result looked a little flat so I tweaked the transparancy of my color blend layer until I was happy with both contrast and color.

ooh $, I never thought about that one

jjbong

In similar situations, I've sometimes had success using Dan Margulis' technique described in Chapter 8 of "Photoshop LAB Color" (Impossible Colors). Basically, you go to LAB, paint in colors sampled from elsewhere in color mode (or from another photo - nice idea, Izzy), and then go back to RGB.

Moni

Here is one way to get detail in your blown out areas.

Say this is your photo:

• Open in photoshop
• Make a copy of the layer your picture is on
• With than new layer, hit Filter -> convert for smart filters
• Now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Shadow/Highlight (this is easy since it is the only option available for smart filters)
• You get the following dialog when you ask for more options:

• Adjust Highlights section to taste for the blown out areas -- you don't have to worry about what this tool does to the non-blown out areas
• Now you will get a smart filter in your layer dialog that says Shadow/Highlight underneath
• Click on this layer in the layer palette, the white box, like so:

• Now invert by hitting ctrl i (or cmd i if you have a mac); your smart filter will now appear as a black box
• Select the brush tool and white as your foreground colour
• Now scrub away at the blown out areas but don't touch the areas you like (make sure you are still on the smart filter layer; you also might want to use a soft brush at less than full opacity to get a nice transition)
• You can see where you have painted on your smart filter layer (see red arrow):

Hope this helps.

You can get this set up as an action where it pops up the dialog box, you adjust, and then it completes the steps so you start painting on the smart filter layer.

You can also use a similar technique to get detail in your shadows. Just fiddle with the shadows section of the dialog.

arodney

IF the data is blown out in a rendered image, its gone guys.

You can mess around with blending modes and destroy other data by going into Lab or you can try to clone data from elsewhere but the fact of the matter is, blown out areas in a rendered image has no data.

Stop spinning your wheels if you have the Raw, go directly to the actual data the camera sensor captured and examine that. Now its quite possible that you actually over exposed the data to the point of sensor saturation and that data is gone as well (255/255/255) no matter the rendering settings in the converter. But keep in mind, with Raw data, HALF of all the information the camera is able to capture is in the first stop of highlight detail! Once you encode that into a working space in Photoshop (a 1.8 or 2.2 gamma), you've spread that data across the image AND you have baked those pixel values.

People who obsess about using all kinds of tricks in odd color models to fix what is probably not necessary to fix (but rather to render), just waste their time and data. Do the heavy lifting at the Raw conversion stage if you were smart enough to capture Raw in the first place.

Check this out with respect to highlight data in a Raw:

http://www.digitalphotopro.com/tech/exposing-for-raw.html

If indeed you can't get sufficient highlight data from the Raw, OK, mess around with all the convoluted retouching tricks, that's where Photoshop shines. But that should always be plan B.

pathfinder

Great article Andrew.

Shooting to the right is essentially re-rating the camera to a lower than stated ISO isn't it? If the camera is set to 200 ISO, and you shoot to the right 1 stop, that is the same as setting the camera ISO to 100 isn't it, but without changing the aperture or shutter speed for the new lower ISO.

arodney

pathfinder wrote:

Shooting to the right is essentially re-rating the camera to a lower than stated ISO isn't it?.

Essentially yes.

pathfinder

Monica - I like your Highlight Salvage post - I will bookmark it and give it a try when I have jpgs that need rescue and do not have the original RAW file to work with. As Andrew says, if you have the RAW file, salvage it there, but there are times when life is not so helpful

I saw from your gallery that you are a photography student at Ryerson University in Toronto. What a target rich environment for a photographer.


This is a post for adults only, from here on ......


I was there for a workshop last weekend. I found Toronto delightful, and plan on returning in the spring.

Does this look familiar? I am sure you recognize the banner.

pathfinder

Andrew,

I am amazed at how much more robust Adobe Camera Raw 4.* is than the previous version 3.0

I thought the tactics I used in ACR 3.0 would translate pretty directly to 4.1 +, but I continue to learn new features with 4.+ that contribute to better and faster processing of my images.

Sharpening in RAW was not something that I did in 3.0, but in 4.2, capture sharpening really works very well.

Moni

pathfinder wrote:

Monica - I like your Highlight Salvage post - I will bookmark it and give it a try when I have jpgs that need rescue and do not have the original RAW file to work with. As Andrew says, if you have the RAW file, salvage it there, but there are times when life is not so helpful

My instructor taught me this for shadows because there is a lot of detail that can hide there without being blown out. I have used it for highlights to recapture some extra detail from the area surrounding a lens flare. Balancing the rest of the picture in that case started to blow the highlights and I wasn't happy with what the Levels did to it.

pathfinder wrote:

I saw from your gallery that you are a photography student at Ryerson University in Toronto. What a target rich environment for a photographer.


This is a post for adults only, from here on ......


I was there for a workshop last weekend. I found Toronto delightful, and plan on returning in the spring.

Does this look familiar? I am sure you recognize the banner.

Ha! That is funny, but I think Canadian morality standards wouldn't say this picture is very racy. Especially given the neighbourhood (or should I say gay-bourhood).
I used to live across the street from this particular billboard. When Spiderman 2 came out, I considered it my own personal Spiderman poster.
Here's another view of it (bottom right) from 2003 but I think it was a Heineken poster then.

Moni

pathfinder wrote:

Monica - I like your Highlight Salvage post - I will bookmark it and give it a try when I have jpgs that need rescue and do not have the original RAW file to work with.
...

I used this technique when my niece's slippers lost most of their detail when I adjusted Camera Raw for her face.
Before:


After:

jdryan3

pathfinder wrote:

Does this look familiar? I am sure you recognize the banner.

Oh the irony! Public Parking? How many times did you have to walk around to frame the sign, uh, there? :wow

Moni

jdryan3 wrote:

Oh the irony! Public Parking? How many times did you have to walk around to frame the sign, uh, there? :wow

Oooh, I didn't even notice that...
I think I'll go to class early tonight and get my own capture.

pathfinder

jdryan3 wrote:

Oh the irony! Public Parking? How many times did you have to walk around to frame the sign, uh, there? :wow

Pure accident I am sure.

Jay said "Do NOT include anything in your image, unless you intend the viewer to read it!!"

That is why I also included the Ryerson University banner as well. I just thought it was an unique juxtaposition