Sun Spots/Shadows help!

[afishk7]

Hi Everyone! I am new on here and am looking forward to discussing and learning new things! I have a question about sun spots/or shadows in pictures. Is there any ways to remove or correct them in adobe lightroom? I am currently shooting in JEPG. See the link with the example picture. She has a sun spot on her leg and on her head. When I get this picture printed, it looks really bad, is there any way to correct this, or is this just a really bad picture? I would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you! I'm giving the URL, because the picture would not upload.

IMG_3255 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

 

[Misfitlimp]

U need to shoot in RAW to get the most outta lightroom.

 

[musicaleCA]

Use the IMG tags and link to the picture. You'll get more responses.

The hotspots are not caused by the sun per-se, just the harsh light that comes from the sun during most of the day. This image was obviously shot during harsh daylight, possibly around high noon (the worst time).

Even if you shot RAW, I doubt recovery would have helped much, there are so many stops of contrast between the shadows and blown highlights. Since you only have a JPEG, there's definitely no way to recover detail. You need to do a reshoot later or earlier in the day (within about an hour of sunrise or sunset).

 

[afishk7]

Thank you for the info! This was taken at around 5 pm.

 

[musicaleCA]

Then you need to wait until later. Probably 7 at least at this time of year, but you should look online for a program or widget that will calculate sunset based on your latitude and longitude.

 

[KmH]

Still a very bad time of day, mid-summer, to be trying to make portraits outdoors.

The best times are the hour after sun up and the hour before sundown.

Those spots would have been readily visible in a camera viewfinder before the image was captured at any rate.

The way to avoid the problems in this image is to use flash in shaded settings to balance the bright background light.