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

madiggmadigg Registered Users Posts: 123 Major grins
edited June 7, 2008 in Finishing School
308014176_8nbqk-L-1.jpg

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    BkodgerBkodger Registered Users Posts: 157 Major grins
    edited June 6, 2008
    madigg wrote:
    308014176_8nbqk-L-1.jpg


    How is that?


    308014176_8nbqk-L-1Edit.jpg
    Nikon D610
    70-200 f.28, 24-85
    www.PhotoExpectations.com
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    jjbongjjbong Registered Users Posts: 244 Major grins
    edited June 7, 2008
    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:

    308852428_GZLi9-L.jpg

    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:

    308851949_Gdcwp-L.jpg

    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.
    John Bongiovanni
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