waterfall that's too dark - suggestions?

Tessa HD

I underexposed this in hopes of not blowing out the detail in the water, but am lost with how to proceed to give this more oomph and keep the detail. Would anyone be willing to share their tricks? Thank you in advance!

Travis

Do you have the RAW file for this image? I would start there on correcting the exposure using either the exposure and blacks sliders or the curves adjustment.

If not, a quick method is to open the image in Photoshop, duplicate the layer, and set the top layer to screen. Adjust the layer opacity to reduce the effect if necessary. You may also need to add a layer mask to protect some of the highlights. You may need to add a curves layer set to luminosity to adjust contrast.

You can also try the shadow/highlight tool but be careful not to go overboard. This is only recommended if you have CS3 as the early version is horrible.

I'm sure others here have some better solutions but this is a starting point. Cool capture by the way. Hope this helps....

Tessa HD

Travis wrote:

Do you have the RAW file for this image? I would start there on correcting the exposure using either the exposure and blacks sliders or the curves adjustment.

If not, a quick method is to open the image in Photoshop, duplicate the layer, and set the top layer to screen. Adjust the layer opacity to reduce the effect if necessary. You may also need to add a layer mask to protect some of the highlights. You may need to add a curves layer set to luminosity to adjust contrast.

You can also try the shadow/highlight tool but be careful not to go overboard. This is only recommended if you have CS3 as the early version is horrible.

I'm sure others here have some better solutions but this is a starting point. Cool capture by the way. Hope this helps....

Hi Travis,

Thank you for your suggestions. No I wasn't shooting in raw.

SloYerRoll

Hi Tessa,

I've been studying shots like this allot lately since it's going to be my next gear purchase.

In order to get a really good blur shot. You need to have an ND (neutral density) filter. What this filter does is reduce the amount of light that hits your sensor so you can take longer exposures. The same exact principal as sunglasses and your eyes.

This way you can take a 30second -however long you want (depends on the filter) second shot and not blow anything out. It's what gets those ultra glassy shots that are exposed just right.

I can't recommend anything for your existing shot. Since you didn't shoot RAW. I'm sure you can tweak it a bit. But there's allot of lost data that you just won't get back w/ a jpeg.

Cheers,
-Jon

zacker

on a new layer, use the dodge tool to lighten up where you want it.. i spend alot of time on these...thats why i dont care to shoot water falls any more.. lol

jfriend

Shadow/Highlights and an s-curve

Tessa HD wrote:

I underexposed this in hopes of not blowing out the detail in the water, but am lost with how to proceed to give this more oomph and keep the detail. Would anyone be willing to share their tricks? Thank you in advance!

There are many ways to approach this one. The simplest way I can think of is a shadow/highlight adjustment and a small S-curve to increase contrast. I went for a pretty strong shadow move to restore detail in the dark areas and a little highlight adjustment to provide a little headroom on the brightest spots for an s-curve. The brightest areas could be protected a little more here, but I personally don't mind a little blow out in the brightest part of waterfalls because it lets me get more mid-tone contrast and I think it even adds to the scene.

I got this result in just a few minutes:



And your original:

Tessa HD

SloYerRoll wrote:

Hi Tessa,

I've been studying shots like this allot lately since it's going to be my next gear purchase.

In order to get a really good blur shot. You need to have an ND (neutral density) filter. What this filter does is reduce the amount of light that hits your sensor so you can take longer exposures. The same exact principal as sunglasses and your eyes.

This way you can take a 30second -however long you want (depends on the filter) second shot and not blow anything out. It's what gets those ultra glassy shots that are exposed just right.

I can't recommend anything for your existing shot. Since you didn't shoot RAW. I'm sure you can tweak it a bit. But there's allot of lost data that you just won't get back w/ a jpeg.

Cheers,
-Jon

Thanks for the tip on the lens, Jon. Up to this point I haven't had much of an opportunity to shoot waterfalls, but there may be a growing interest now!

Tessa HD

zacker wrote:

on a new layer, use the dodge tool to lighten up where you want it.. i spend alot of time on these...thats why i dont care to shoot water falls any more.. lol

I've been sitting here messing around with this picture, and I liked what the dodge tool did. I also burned shadows on the brighter parts of the water to help show more detail. What do you think of these adjustments? Is it generally more desirable for flowing water to be shot at longer exposures for a smoother look? or is it personal preference?

Tessa HD

Thank you for your example. Something in my mind wants to keep those highlights down more, though your higher contrast is interesting too.

edgework

The problem with an image like this is that a simple contrast move won't do the trick. There are multiple regions that need their contrast enhanced which means you have to be judicious in your choice of areas to hide the flat pixels.

I used this curve to strengthen the contrast in the brightest areas where the sun was hitting the snow, the water and ice to the right of the image, and the shadows (which have lots of detail that is getting plugged up):



The three areas where the curve is steepened are each followed by a flattened stretch, but I think it managed to avoid crucial detail in the image. This brought out the detail nicely but made the whole thing feel a little light, so I merged to a new layer, copied that into CMYK and used the black plate to select the darkest areas and pop them into their own layer. Color burn at 26% gave some nice weight to the top end without losing the newly found detail.

MarkR

Tessa HD wrote:

Is it generally more desirable for flowing water to be shot at longer exposures for a smoother look? or is it personal preference?

Personal preference. A lot of photographers like shooting water at long exposure; it gives the water a foggy, ghostly appearance. I personally don't care for that look.

EDIT: BTW, you did an absolutely fantastic, by-the-book job of exposing for the highlights, which makes post-processing a lot easier -- all you have to do is bring out some shadow detail, and there's about a million ways to skin that cat.

largelylivin

I don't really think its to dark: it just depends your personal vision. I took a different approach, kinda just to be different. Opinions please.

Short version: I split the image into high and low illumination. Applied a 17% multiply to the low and added a clipped color layer in mid-blue, adjusted to taste. On the high illum layer I used a 100% soft light and added a clipped Turquoise and adjusted to taste.

Tessa HD

The Hobbyist wrote:

EDIT: BTW, you did an absolutely fantastic, by-the-book job of exposing for the highlights, which makes post-processing a lot easier -- all you have to do is bring out some shadow detail, and there's about a million ways to skin that cat.

Thank you so much for your comments!!!

Tessa HD

largelylivin wrote:

I don't really think its to dark: it just depends your personal vision. I took a different approach, kinda just to be different. Opinions please.

Short version: I split the image into high and low illumination. Applied a 17% multiply to the low and added a clipped color layer in mid-blue, adjusted to taste. On the high illum layer I used a 100% soft light and added a clipped Turquoise and adjusted to taste.

Thank you! I like what you did. I don't know what you mean by splitting into high and low illumination though. Would you explain?

largelylivin

It is an undocumented feature of PS CS2 and its used a lot in photo restoration. You can come close by using the select color>dark tones and select color>highlights, into two different layers and then 'tinting' each with different colors, aka 'split toning'.

For a thorough explanation see Restoration & Retouching by Katrin Eismann. There are some not obvious details that can foul things up.

This is how you do it on a PC, don't know the Mac equivalents. To do an illumination copy: select Channels, select RGB, Cntl-Alt-Click (simultaneously). Cntl-J creates a new layer with a copy of the high-illumination areas. To get the inverse, Cntl-Alt-Click, then Cntl-Shift-I to invert, Cntl-J. Hint: when you go to work on the separate Illumination layers, first Create Group from Layer on each one, otherwise things get fouled up pretty easy.

Example: You can sometimes restore blown out highlights by doing an illumination copy and setting the blend mode to Multiply. Sometimes one 100% multiply layer won't be enough so just start stacking copies with Cntl-J: but do it within a Group. You can also bring out details in to dark areas by using the inverse illum copy with blend mode set to soft light or screen. Try color burn/dodge, hard light and overlay for different effect.

Here's a couple of my favorite split-toned efforts:

Tessa HD

Awesome - Thanks!

Nightline

Hi there,

a bit late I also tried something. Maybe it's what you're searching for.

Tessa HD

Nightline wrote:

Hi there,

a bit late I also tried something. Maybe it's what you're searching for.

Thank you - that looks good - what did you do?

Nightline

Tessa HD wrote:

Thank you - that looks good - what did you do?

Here are my steps:

- Add an [SIZE=-1]adjustment layer (Levels) and move the white and midtone slider to the left until you are satisfied [/SIZE]with the underexposed side. Click OK.
- Check if the layer mask of the adjustment layer is active, select the linear gradient tool (black to white) and drag from the left to the right. Your correctly exposed right side will look good again and the whole image should be ok now.