Correcting overexposed without messing up good exposrue

jandrewnelson · February 9, 2009

How do I correct this?

I'm fairly well pleased with the picture except for the skin tones. Seem like they're too overexposed. How do I correct the exposure on the skin tones without screwing up the rest of the picture? BTW, I use GIMP.

Thanks in advance for the help!

jjbong · February 9, 2009

jandrewnelson wrote:

I'm fairly well pleased with the picture except for the skin tones. Seem like they're too overexposed. How do I correct the exposure on the skin tones without screwing up the rest of the picture? BTW, I use GIMP.

This will be difficult if not impossible with any PP software. Most of the face is completely blown out (L values of 98 or higher, no color; equivalently, R,G,B values all higher than 253). So there's no detail to enhance in a realistic way. The best you could do is to paint in skin tone, but that will look strange, as it will be unrealistically uniform.

jandrewnelson · February 9, 2009

jjbong wrote:

Most of the face is completely blown out (L values of 98 or higher, no color; equivalently, R,G,B values all higher than 253)

Thanks for the reply. Could you do me a favor? Explain what you just said to me. I'm a serious amateure, but I have no clue as to what "L" values are, RGB higher than 253, etc.

Thanks again!
Jerry Nelson

catspaw · February 9, 2009

Lightroom is available as a free 30-day trail (full version, not a striped down one). Download it and play with the image in there -- you'll see the R, B, G and other tools the other poster is talking about.

jfriend · February 9, 2009

catspaw wrote:

Lightroom is available as a free 30-day trail (full version, not a striped down one). Download it and play with the image in there -- you'll see the R, B, G and other tools the other poster is talking about.

I'm wondering why Lightroom will help here? The original poster already has Gimp which is a more capable pixel editor than Lightroom.

The issue with this image is that the facial tones are overexposed to the point that there is no detail there. Unless the originals were shot in RAW, that facial detail is just gone and no JPEG editor is going to bring it back.

catspaw · February 9, 2009

jfriend wrote:

I'm wondering why Lightroom will help here? The original poster already has Gimp which is a more capable pixel editor than Lightroom.

The issue with this image is that the facial tones are overexposed to the point that there is no detail there. Unless the originals were shot in RAW, that facial detail is just gone and no JPEG editor is going to bring it back.

well if they have no sliders, doesn't seem like the gimp is very capable. I went by what the OP said on that one.

Candid Arts · February 9, 2009

How is something like this? Just a very quick attempt in the middle of my digital tools class... You can obviously do a lot more with it, especially if this is originally a RAW file, or atleast a larger size JPEG than posted.

(I hope you don't mind my trying)

jfriend · February 9, 2009

catspaw wrote:

well if they have no sliders, doesn't seem like the gimp is very capable. I went by what the OP said on that one.

I don't know where the comment about "sliders" came from as I don't see that in this thread. Gimp is similar to Photoshop and has very rich pixel editing. Just to give you an idea for what it can do, here are a couple links to a bunch of tutorials and one for fixing blown highlights (which probably wouldn't work in this case, but is a nice example of the depth of functionality that GIMP has).

I agree with Candid Arts that about the best that can be done with this shot is to tone down the highlights so they aren't so bright, but there still won't be any detail in the face. I actually think the whole photo is overexposed, including the forest so I'd like to see the background forest reduced in exposure too.

jjbong · February 9, 2009

jandrewnelson wrote:

Thanks for the reply. Could you do me a favor? Explain what you just said to me. I'm a serious amateure, but I have no clue as to what "L" values are, RGB higher than 253, etc.
Jerry Nelson

Sorry for the terse reply.

Very simply, the color at each pixel in the image is represented by the amount of Red (R), Green (G), and Blue (B) light intensities. These combine to produce the color you see. This is how a TV, or a monitor works. In the image you have, the R, G, and B values go from 0 (dark) to 255 (maximum brightness). With most image editors, you can read the R, G, and B values by running the cursor over a section of the image. What we see as detail in the image is variation in lightness or color or both. If you have a section of the image where these numbers don't vary much (like most of the face in your image), then there's no detail. It's just a big, flat section, caused by the overexposure (the area is said to be "blown out").

Why does this matter? If the area weren't blown out and still had detail, but it was too light or had a color cast, you could fix that and get a realistic looking face that retained the detail. How you do that depends on the program you're using. But with no detail, all you can do is darken it and/or change the color. What you end up with is a flat (uniform) section - darker, with a single color, and hence not very realistic, as in real faces there's variation in both color and lightness.

Hope this makes sense.

arodney · February 9, 2009

The first question has to be, is there a Raw available or not. Until we know, there are two vastly different courses the user could take.

Correcting overexposed without messing up good exposrue

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