Family Photo, and 2 are in shadows..can you help

madigg

Bkodger

madigg wrote:

How is that?

jjbong

There are many ways to approach this, including painting through a 50% grey layer in Overlay mode (or Soft Light) to lighten the areas that are too dark.

By the way, there's a blue cast in your shot. In both of the examples I include below, I've removed this with curves in Color mode.

For what you're trying to do, I prefer one of two methods: Shadow/Highlight, and Overlay.

There's an excellent tutorial by rutt on Shadow/Highlight here:
http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1777665

Using this technique, with tonal width=23, radius=25, and amount=37, I get this:



For the Overlay technique, here's a short tutorial:
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=64165

Using this technique, with Soft Light mode instead of Overlay, Gaussian blur of 19.5 and layer opacity of 100%, I get this:



I think it lightens the faces a bit more than Fad2blk's fix and the arms of the two girls in the front row and the boy between them look better, but it's not too different (other than removing the blue cast).

Of course, you'd probably like the faces in the back even lighter. And you can probably get that, spending more time and effort on it. But each of the techniques I used here take a couple of minutes.