How to fix this terrible shot?

ReeferBen · January 16, 2005

It's the only one I have and need to get something decent to print out, it needs work and it has a reddish haze or something making it look worse. How would you fix it? The background is overexposed and the foreground is underexposed, would a larger flash have helped this?

Thanks!

Allen · January 16, 2005

ReeferBen wrote:

It's the only one I have and need to get something decent to print out, it needs work and it has a reddish haze or something making it look worse. How would you fix it? The background is overexposed and the foreground is underexposed, would a larger flash have helped this?

Thanks!

My quick and dirty using PSP9. Not very good but it shows that something can be salvaged from it.

lynnma · January 16, 2005

real quick.. five mins..

not too good and everyone has a bad case of frekles but it could be improved on with a little work..

wxwax · January 16, 2005

Yes, a much more powerful light would have helped the shot immensely.

wxwax · January 16, 2005

Some quick work.

ReeferBen · January 17, 2005

Thanks guys, was this just a bit of contrast/brightness work?

wxwax · January 18, 2005

With mine I made a duplicate layer then tried the different blending modes in Photoshop, found one that lightned the foreground, then I masked in the background. There was a lot of noise, so I used Noise Ninja to control it a bit, which is why mine is slightly soft.

Next time, don't put them in the shade, against a bright background! They're terribly backlit. Good for making silhouettes, bad for group portraits.

GREAPER · January 18, 2005

N tell the guy in the back to put a shirt on,

rutt · January 18, 2005

ReeferBen wrote:

It's the only one I have and need to get something decent to print out, it needs work and it has a reddish haze or something making it look worse. How would you fix it? The background is overexposed and the foreground is underexposed, would a larger flash have helped this?

Thanks!

I gave this a try, working with such a low res vesion is frustraing. If you post a link to the original, there might be some hope.

philspace · January 18, 2005

rutt wrote:

I gave this a try, working with such a low res vesion is frustraing. If you post a link to the original, there might be some hope.

Same here - this is the best I could do with it

wxwax · January 18, 2005

Shoot, that's pretty darn good, philspace.

philspace · January 18, 2005

wxwax wrote:

Shoot, that's pretty darn good, philspace.

Thanks, I've been doing a lot of reading and practicing. Have done this at work on other kinds of imagery and decided Photoshop is more fun that ELT 4000

landrum · January 18, 2005

This is a super quick go at it.

What I did was duplicate the background image. Then I adjusted the bottom one to the background(darker) and the top one to the subjects(lighter).

I erased around the subjects to see the background where needed. I didn't take the time to really get close around each person, that's why they have halos.

Then I used the lasso to select the man in the red shirt's head and did some selective color adjustment to remove some magenta from the reds.

Obviously there is a lot of work needed and some noise adjustments are necessary. You won't get anything great, but you can at least get the faces out.

Hope that helps...

ReeferBen · January 19, 2005

Thanks a lot guys and gals! I dont have a smugmug account yet so can't post the full res. image but I got the idea on how to fix it now. Photoshop is so confusing and so are the books on it!

How to fix this terrible shot?

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