This photo is too bright!

pennylane · Aug 12, 2005

I'm fairly new to photography, but one of my friends demanded that I take their senior pictures for them.

Never one to turn down some free experience, I agreed. Now I know that the number one rule of shooting portraits outside is to do it in early morning or alate evening when the sun's not too bright. Apparently 7 AM wasn't quite early enough. This photo is one of my favorites that I took, but it's waaaay too bright. And I'm not digging the shadows from the umbrella on my friend's hair. I've tried Googling a solution for this, but the only answer I can find is Photoshop CS's Shadows and Highlights tool. Unfortunately, I have Photoshop 7. Do you guys have any suggestions?

Here's a link to the photo on my server. It's ginormous.
http://www.immiscible.net/pics/PICT0047.jpg

Meysha · Aug 12, 2005

Basically you're stuffed. It's simply overexposed and unfortunately blownout areas are practically impossible to fix in PS unless you're an artist and can paint with a mouse really well.

I've done it to the extreme a little in this version I cooked up for you, just to show you that it's gonna be impossible to fix.
See the white white white areas in the umbrella and on her hand, and shirt. These areas are white because there is no colour detail. No matter what you do, nothing will change them (except the grayness of them) because there is no colour there.

I've reduced the shadows as well in the background to show you that there is colour data there (even though it shows up black on your screen - it knows that there is green in there). And if you change the settings carefully you can get it to look nice, but not turn all grainy like it has in my version.

I'd suggest you play with the levels in your photo, and use different levels settings on different layers. Use masks to cover up parts of the 'levels' that you don't want to be changed.

Then I'd head on over to the Portraits section of the forum and ask for a bit of help on the lighting side of your photo. To me it looks that if you sped your shutter speed up anymore, the rest of her body would become too dark. So you're probably right about the sunlight being too harsh. But still, head on over to the other section and they'll give you suggestions.

Meysha · Aug 12, 2005

Oops, forgot to attach the photo. Here it is. Make sure you click on it coz the thumbnail distorts all the colours.

Vmann · Aug 12, 2005

Im with meysha. The amount of time it will take to fix... paint in detail your better of shoting this again if you can. If you really must fix this photo you can try using the selective color adjustment layer (adjustment layers are found in the layer pallette next to the new layer button) click the white from the dropdown menu then adjust the colors needed to fill the white. It will affect the whole photo but with it having a mask you can paint out the areas you dont want affected. You can also keep stacking as many adjustment layers as needed to get the affect you will need.

Good luck... but I would reshoot