Salvaging Photos

SALVAGING BAD PHOTOS AND VIDEO

PART TWO - Dealing with Excessive Contrast - continued

In this photo we have a shot of the Quarry near Bronson Caves. Again, it was shot with a midrange digital camera with automatic light meter. And again, it has the expected dark shadows, with details lost in darkness. So, let's proceed with the techniques we used in Part One.

As before, using levels to lighten the image shows us the details in the dark, but washes out the overall image. Not quite what we want.

So, here is the result after following the steps outlined in Part One. Still not quite what we want. The shadow detail is indeed beginning to emerge, but the well-lighted areas are beginning to look a bit funky. In fact, they were better the way they were...

Wouldn't it be great if we could just alter the areas that we want to fix, and not the entire image?
Remember what I said earlier about the nature of the Overlay Mode? Dark pixels darken, light pixels lighten, but the midrange pixels have no effect? This fact is going to help us now.
Let's go back to our top layer (viewed in
Normal mode for now).

Use Levels to darken all but the lightest
areas. Keep in mind, this is a negative,
so the light areas are the shadows
from which we hope to bring out more detail.

So far so good, but we do not want these black areas to remain black, as they will darken the light areas even further.
We want to actually keep the light areas as they were to begin with.
To do this, we want to make these black
areas that midrange gray we mentioned
earlier, as it will neither lighten nor
darken these areas. Selecting the black
arrow at the very bottom left of the image
controls, and dragging until it reads
"128" will give us the medium
gray we need.

Now we have a layer with a medium gray,
which will have no effect on the image, and
lighter grays which will lighten the
shadow areas.

Applying the above layer to the original image in Overlay Mode, at a rather low opacity, gives us this resulting image. Higher opacities of the layer lighten the shadows further, to a rather surreal level.
With this technique, one can isolate specific areas to lighten or darken, without harming the rest of the image.

BACK PART ONE PART THREE

Return to Tutorials

In this photo we have a shot of the Quarry near Bronson Caves. Again, it was shot with a midrange digital camera with automatic light meter. And again, it has the expected dark shadows, with details lost in darkness. So, let's proceed with the techniques we used in Part One.
As before, using levels to lighten the image shows us the details in the dark, but washes out the overall image. Not quite what we want.
So, here is the result after following the steps outlined in Part One. Still not quite what we want. The shadow detail is indeed beginning to emerge, but the well-lighted areas are beginning to look a bit funky. In fact, they were better the way they were...

Wouldn't it be great if we could just alter the areas that we want to fix, and not the entire image? Remember what I said earlier about the nature of the Overlay Mode? Dark pixels darken, light pixels lighten, but the midrange pixels have no effect? This fact is going to help us now.	Let's go back to our top layer (viewed in Normal mode for now). Use Levels to darken all but the lightest areas. Keep in mind, this is a negative, so the light areas are the shadows from which we hope to bring out more detail.
So far so good, but we do not want these black areas to remain black, as they will darken the light areas even further. We want to actually keep the light areas as they were to begin with.	To do this, we want to make these black areas that midrange gray we mentioned earlier, as it will neither lighten nor darken these areas. Selecting the black arrow at the very bottom left of the image controls, and dragging until it reads "128" will give us the medium gray we need. Now we have a layer with a medium gray, which will have no effect on the image, and lighter grays which will lighten the shadow areas.