- Joined
- May 1, 2008
- Messages
- 25,414
- Reaction score
- 4,998
- Location
- UK - England
- Website
- www.deviantart.com
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
Sometimes you get a shot, an no matter how well you controled the shot and the lighting at the time you will get areas where there are very strong whites and very dark blacks.
So you bring the shot back and open it up in RAW editing using your choice of program and you are met with a problem. No matter how you adjust the sliders you just can't get the whites to show their detail without having a very dark shot overall which then looks underexposed. So you have to bite the bullet and either go for an overall brighter shot and less details or a darker more detailed shot.
However all is not lost - you can set the exposure to look brighter - open the shot up into editing and then use the burn tool to lessen that harsh white glare and show up some of the hidden away details; and if you work with the bursh set to a low exposure (say around 7) you can build up the effect in layers to get the amount you want.
I did this myself in the shot below
In this shot the left side of the tail and head were far too bright for the rest of the shot - so I burned them.
However in burning they have taken on a slightly greyer tone than when the shot was taken, when the insect was shown as being more white rather than grey. So what to do - well one way is to process the RAW file twice and then merge the combined shots together.
Just using the exposure slider alone one can get a single shot to look like the following pair:
Two very different looks from the very same image and each one showing something that the other can't achive alone. Process and save the results each shot - keeping such settings as white balance, clarity, saturation, contrast etc.. the same between both shots. Just adjust the exopsure and brightness sliders. (save as a TIFF file so that the image quality is preserved rather than a JPEG which will lose data with more saves).
Now with both shots open you can take the underexposed version and copy and then paste it as a layer into workspace for the overexposed shot. Now you can use a layermask and a brush to brush away those areas of the shot you don't want and those you do.
(there is more info on working with layermasks in general here:
Layers -- Part I
further for those on photoshop elements there is a free layermask addon here:
Free Layer Mask Tool for Photoshop Elements (Win/Mac Any Version) )
Thus allowing you to combine the results from both images into a single shot:
(note this might look darker than the above and that is just a result of me playing around with editing and ending up with a darker result in the end - and probably my viewing angle being different at the time because of my cheap monitor.....)
Note how the whites are now actually white rather than a shade of grey.
Of course you can do this more than once if you also want to overexpose the shot to show up more details in the darker areas (remember though that these areas will start to show more noise as a result of the increasing of exposure). And thus you can process two or three images together this way.
Some might call this method tone mapping or false HDR as well.
Larger examples of all the shots here are present in the flickr set:
MPE 65mm first field test - a set on Flickr
So you bring the shot back and open it up in RAW editing using your choice of program and you are met with a problem. No matter how you adjust the sliders you just can't get the whites to show their detail without having a very dark shot overall which then looks underexposed. So you have to bite the bullet and either go for an overall brighter shot and less details or a darker more detailed shot.
However all is not lost - you can set the exposure to look brighter - open the shot up into editing and then use the burn tool to lessen that harsh white glare and show up some of the hidden away details; and if you work with the bursh set to a low exposure (say around 7) you can build up the effect in layers to get the amount you want.
I did this myself in the shot below
In this shot the left side of the tail and head were far too bright for the rest of the shot - so I burned them.
However in burning they have taken on a slightly greyer tone than when the shot was taken, when the insect was shown as being more white rather than grey. So what to do - well one way is to process the RAW file twice and then merge the combined shots together.
Just using the exposure slider alone one can get a single shot to look like the following pair:
Two very different looks from the very same image and each one showing something that the other can't achive alone. Process and save the results each shot - keeping such settings as white balance, clarity, saturation, contrast etc.. the same between both shots. Just adjust the exopsure and brightness sliders. (save as a TIFF file so that the image quality is preserved rather than a JPEG which will lose data with more saves).
Now with both shots open you can take the underexposed version and copy and then paste it as a layer into workspace for the overexposed shot. Now you can use a layermask and a brush to brush away those areas of the shot you don't want and those you do.
(there is more info on working with layermasks in general here:
Layers -- Part I
further for those on photoshop elements there is a free layermask addon here:
Free Layer Mask Tool for Photoshop Elements (Win/Mac Any Version) )
Thus allowing you to combine the results from both images into a single shot:
(note this might look darker than the above and that is just a result of me playing around with editing and ending up with a darker result in the end - and probably my viewing angle being different at the time because of my cheap monitor.....)
Note how the whites are now actually white rather than a shade of grey.
Of course you can do this more than once if you also want to overexpose the shot to show up more details in the darker areas (remember though that these areas will start to show more noise as a result of the increasing of exposure). And thus you can process two or three images together this way.
Some might call this method tone mapping or false HDR as well.
Larger examples of all the shots here are present in the flickr set:
MPE 65mm first field test - a set on Flickr
Last edited: