A little help...

[Reyna]

I went to a wedding this weekend and took my dslr. This is my first slr camera and I am still trying to figure it out. I took this pic. that I really like but I can't see the detail in her dress. Can I adjust that using photoshop? What could I do to fix it or can it be fixed?

 

[benlonghair]

I went to a wedding this weekend and took my dslr. This is my first slr camera and I am still trying to figure it out. I took this pic. that I really like but I can't see the detail in her dress. Can I adjust that using photoshop? What could I do to fix it or can it be fixed?

I'm a noob myself, but from what I've learned here, probably not. It's overexposed. You might get some back, but probably not as much as you'd like. If you shot in RAW you might be able to lower the exposure and burn the face a little, but I think your results would be less than optimal.

I'd suggest two things to think about in the future. Meter off the dress and (if you're shooting is auto/shutter priority/appeture priority) lock the exposure then recompose and take the shot. This will lead to the face being underexposed to some extent.

Or have the person move to a slightly shady place where the white isn't so much brighter than skin tone. This would probably be your best bet.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[AgentDrex]

Unfortunately since this seems to be washed-out, getting any detail pulled out will be difficult. In the future, try stepping down your aperture so its a tad underexposed. Its always easier to bring out details in post-process that way. Good luck in future shots.

 

[aklaube87]

Which version of photoshop do you have?

Like Agent said, it may be hard to pull detail out. A last effort could be used by messing with the Contrast/Hue/White Balance
->Image> Adjustments

Other than that, I don't have enough knowledge yet of Adobe to be of further assistance

 

[AgentDrex]

I tried tweaking it in PS but to no avail. Details have been too washed out. Sorry. I tried. Maybe someone else here has the magic touch. Better luck in the future.

 

[aklaube87]

I still feel like something can be done to this... what did you use to tweak?

 

[Reyna]

I still feel like something can be done to this... what did you use to tweak?

I have Photoshop cs2 but don't really know how to use it.... I would love that! I took this pic and thought, I can send this to her and she will love it. Little did I know how blown the pic was!!

 

[kundalini]

The details in that shot are likely gone. Since you have CS2, shoot RAW.

I tend to disagree with AgentDrex about underexposing. In fact, I tend to overexpose by a 1/3 to 2/3 stops intentially and bring the exposure back down in post (.... and I'm no PP guru at all). In your shot though, that may have been a different matter. Meter for the dress, meter for her face and adjust Exposure Comp to bring back in line for white rather than middle grey.

Here's some light reading for you.
Understanding Histograms
Expose to the Right

 

[Dylan-Fishman]

Let me first say I am horrible at PP. But I got some facial details out but it looks horribly over contrasted (because that's what I did! haha)

The whites on her left chest are completely blown out though.

 

[fokker]

If you have the raw file you should be able to get something out of it by using the image>adjustments>shadow/highlight function

 

[musicaleCA]

As kundalini noted, the details are likely gone. I say that judging by how much clipping is happening over how much of the dress' area. The skin tones look a little over exposed as well.

As noted above, metering off the dress is a good way to start, but if you do that, make sure to either set your EV bias to around +2/3 or if in M, expose a +2/3 stop (or thereabouts; experience will let you do this more accurately in future). The meter only tells you the proper exposure to make what you're metering 18% grey; a white dress isn't grey though, it's white, so you need to make sure you interpret the meter properly and expose more when metering off such a bright object (the reverse is true with dark objects).

In any case, highlight recovery is only a stop-gap measure; a salvage effort. You can push it too far and introduce colour shift, and at best come-out with low-contrast highlights. In this case, I'd wager that the colour shift, if any, would be toward blue, given that it's outside in daylight.

 

[mikemicki]

Hi Reyna. I tried to get some detail. I darkened it slightly & I tried to bump up the contrast a bit on the 1st edit. The 2nd one is more of a "glamour" glow style I was going for. I also noticed that her ear seemed a bit red. I just clone stamped it out. This was just a quick photoshop edit.
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