I'm not a novice to PS (work a lot with graphics), but I am pretty new to PP photos. I used to believe that everything had to be done correctly in the camera and that PP wasn't necessary. I have since realized that is not the case and most shots would benefit from some (or a lot) of PP.
I took this shot a few weeks ago and am not happy as to how overblown the lighting is. I know its possible to take it down a notch...I played around with exposure, brightness & contrast, but I just can't seem to get something I am happy with and that looks natural. I am just using this shot as an example, but would like to learn more about PP techniques for photography.
How would you guys fix/PP this photo? Feel free to play with the picture and please describe what you did. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
EDIT: I recently acquired a copy of Adobe Lightroom as well. Haven't had the chance to play with it yet though.
How's does version this help? I used Nik Viveza to bring back the highlights in the beret/hat and face and lighten the shadows on the leggins and seat a bit.
You could use the shadows and highlighter tool to do a similar thing and mask back what you don't want. The Nik plug in is so much easier.
I colour balanced the image by making a duplicate of the history state and then adding an average blur filter and using this to select it with the grey levels dropper. I then used the opacity slider to bring back some warmth.
I then tidied up with a soft doge brush at about 6% to clean up the white BG.
Just a quick minute job, maybe still a tad too light??
Hope you kept the raw, because one of the problems that may hinder you from getting the results you want when trying to darken the highlights in this picture is that the red channel is blown to smitherens... There's very little to work with in the (very cute!) little face...
Anyway, i tried making a layer copy in which I mixed (with "channel mixer") the red channel to/of 75% red and 25% green. This to "reclaim" some lost highlight detail in the face. ctrl-E to merge the channel-mixer layer with the copy layer. Then I manually corrected the (now VERY "off") colours until I had something that looked as similar as possible to the original (bottom layer) - but with more colour detail in the face.
Then I ran a normal "dampen highlights". Copy the "copy-layer" to a third layer, pull down exposure with "curves", make a layer mask on this layer by selecting the red channel and using it as a selection to make the mask. Adjust opacity of copy2 to taste, merge down with copy layer. Compare to original (bottom layer)
If you're still tracking this, the quickest fix is to use the Recovery slider in lightroom to bring back the highlights. This is most effective if you have the RAW file.
Didn't know that my thread was still alive! Thanks for all the responses! Much appreciated!
I'll have to list down all the different PP techniques mentioned here and give it a try myself.
Unfortunately, I don't think I shot this in RAW. As mentioned in my first post...I wasn't a big believer of PP and thus wasn't fond of shooting RAW. With all that I've seen here and the help you've given me though...I will definitely be switching over!
