Good Friday Witness Walk

Joyseeker

the bright sun light ruined all my shots of this event today.



the best way, with my skills, to overcome the over exposed sky was to do this.



help please.

ShaneJ

You could have moved to the other side of the gathering so you would have had the sun at your back. That would have likely helped the exposure. Of course, I can't see what is behind you here to know what your background composition would have looked like from the opposite angle.

Backlighting is tough, but nice post processing save.

PhotoDavid78

the cross seems to small to do a selective color at such a wide angle. A tighter crop might work though.

DavidTO

I moved this thread to Finishing School, as it is not a request for Whipping, but a request for PP help.

Joyseeker

thanks for the PM advice i have had so far
but no matter what sliders i use i can't stop the over exposed sky taking away from the image.

i shoot raw (if you want that i'll send it as a can't post it). but here is the original untouched jpeg out of elements.



show me where i'm going wrong please.

timk519

I pulled a copy of your image down and tried pushing the exposure and brightness all the way down to their minimums - and it still showed a blown-out sky.

I've never done this, but all I can think to do is to select the blown-out sky with something (magic lasso?), and use that to replace it with color from a non-blown out portion of the sky.

jjbong

Joyseeker wrote:

show me where i'm going wrong please.

The detail in the sky isn't completely gone, in fact, far from it. It's just the color. There are things you could do in Photoshop. I'm not sure about Elements. If you can work in Photoshop, I can take a wack at it. If that's not useful, I won't bother.

By the way, in addition to the sky problem you seem to have a blue cast in the main part of the picture.

Joyseeker

jjbong wrote:

The detail in the sky isn't completely gone, in fact, far from it. It's just the color. There are things you could do in Photoshop. I'm not sure about Elements. If you can work in Photoshop, I can take a wack at it. If that's not useful, I won't bother.

By the way, in addition to the sky problem you seem to have a blue cast in the main part of the picture.

please have a go and i'll copy what you do if i can in elements..... the blue cast comes from me trying to correct the sky

jjbong

Joyseeker wrote:

please have a go and i'll copy what you do if i can in elements..... the blue cast comes from me trying to correct the sky

Some good news, but mostly bad. I started with the version you had fixed, as it had details in the coulds in the blown-out areas that didn't seem to be in the unaltered original (where did they come from? - I found complete uniform whiteness in the whole area). I sampled a bunch of obviously neutral points and did some individual R, G, and B curves to get the numbers equal, and then changed to color mode:



The idea is to paint in something that looks reasonable in the portion of the sky that isn't cloud. But you can begin to see the problem with the lack of definition on the borders of the coulds. Here's what I could do without a lot of work:



Actually not that hard to do, but I wonder whether it's worth it. Clearly there's some fine tuning needed, but the major issue to me is how strange the clouds look in the left side of the picture, compared with those on the right. Cloning from the good clouds to the bad clouds is a possibility, but I just wanted to explore how to paint in the sky.

I suppose that you could just punt the coulds on the left part of the shot and make it more or less uniformly blue.

The other bad news is that this was easy because I could do it in LAB, which I'm fairly certain doesn't exist in Elements. I needed to build two masks, one to isolate the sky from the rest of the shot, and the other to isolate the non-clouds within the sky (this is the area you want to paint into). I did both fairly quickly using extreme curves on the L channel and a copy of the image. This is a terse description, as I don't think a more detailed description would be useful to you. Happy to supply it, if it is useful.

Joyseeker

jjbong wrote:

Some good news, but mostly bad. I started with the version you had fixed, as it had details in the coulds in the blown-out areas that didn't seem to be in the unaltered original (where did they come from? - I found complete uniform whiteness in the whole area). I sampled a bunch of obviously neutral points and did some individual R, G, and B curves to get the numbers equal, and then changed to color mode:



The idea is to paint in something that looks reasonable in the portion of the sky that isn't cloud. But you can begin to see the problem with the lack of definition on the borders of the coulds. Here's what I could do without a lot of work:



Actually not that hard to do, but I wonder whether it's worth it. Clearly there's some fine tuning needed, but the major issue to me is how strange the clouds look in the left side of the picture, compared with those on the right. Cloning from the good clouds to the bad clouds is a possibility, but I just wanted to explore how to paint in the sky.

I suppose that you could just punt the coulds on the left part of the shot and make it more or less uniformly blue.

The other bad news is that this was easy because I could do it in LAB, which I'm fairly certain doesn't exist in Elements. I needed to build two masks, one to isolate the sky from the rest of the shot, and the other to isolate the non-clouds within the sky (this is the area you want to paint into). I did both fairly quickly using extreme curves on the L channel and a copy of the image. This is a terse description, as I don't think a more detailed description would be useful to you. Happy to supply it, if it is useful.

did you 'select' the over exposed area?

jjbong

Joyseeker wrote:

did you 'select' the over exposed area?

Not exactly. I created a mask, which is another way to do the same thing.

I made of copy of the image and went into LAB. The overexposed areas are much higher in the L channel than anything else, so I steepened the L channel so that they were white and everything else was black (I had to do some very rough coloring in with Black inside the border). This gave me a mask with a sharp boundary on it (like where the building meets the sky). This mask is essentially a selection of the sky (and can be transformed into one).

The next step was slightly trickier, but just an extension of the same technique. I wanted to paint into the sky where the cloulds were not. So with another copy of the shot, again in LAB, I inverted the L channel to make the clouds much darker than the sky around them and steepened this with a curve to get black clouds and white sky. The trick was to do this using the first mask, so all of this only happens within the sky. Then I blurred the mask and used the combined masks for painting. I sampled somewhere reasonable in the sky and painted using the mask, so that only the unmasked areas (sky but not clouds) were affected.

If it can be done, this sort of technique gives you a much better selection than trying to generate the selection yourself using any of the tools available for doing that, including extract. It frequently takes very little time, too (just a few minutes in this case). I'm pretty sure that Katrin Eismann covers this in her book on masking and compositing.

Not sure how much of this is available in Elements.

Joyseeker

jjbong wrote:

Not sure how much of this is available in Elements.

thankfully i don't think any of it is available..... thankfully or else it would blow my mind.

thanks for your time jj..... i am humble before you.