Blinding!

[RoseBrideSama]

Hello all!
I have gotten a few photos the are overexposed! With red eye and SUPER bright skin, even with a dark background. I know how to remove the red eye. But the brightness just dosen't want to go. The photos skin is so bright it's one color, besides, where the dark dark shadows are, like right under the eyes and the other side of the face.

I tried the tutorial ' Color Correction Using Paste Into: Contributed by: down2earth2 ' on this very site! But it did NOT work for me, I either didn't do it right or the photos I am using don't like that method.
Please advise me, oh learned ones!

PS. How do I use those awsome emotes?
Thank you all in advance!

[ldg40]

Hi Rose! Don't cha just hate those "hot" pictures! *grumble*! I am not a photographer, but I am sure someone will be on the way will some advice.

As for the emotes, just scroll down to the bottom of this page and you will see a little box on your left had side. should have text like this:

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Just browse the "smilies" and insert the code into your post. Hope that helps!

Linda :)

[RoseBrideSama]

Thank you!:clap:


EDIT: I tryed and tryed but couldn't get it working right.

Thats what I am trying to work with. I even tryed taking skin from someone else but that failed aswell.:mad:

[HighLighter]

Hey there,

I usually don't have that much patience... (as my experience is limited) so I usually end up trying some things, levels, hue/sat (the red eye isn't a big deal, can fill it with a brush stroke and then add a highlight) but the overexposure, just couldn't address... :(

Did apply a 'comix' action to it (Adobe Exchange/actions/comix) and thought the result was pretty good.

(linda... love your new icon! :lol: )

[ldg40]

Oh my! What a beautiful young woman! I see your point, this one is well worth trying to recover!

If it were my image, I would go for layers. Selecting all the hot spots, making a layer from them with the selection tool (apple+J on a mac) & then go through a gazillon adjustments to try to tone down her skin. I'd first try curves, then levels, then hue & saturation, even the color balance. What ever it takes.

I'll downoad the pic & see what I can do (I am terrible with red-eye). but in the mean-time.. don't give up!

Linda :)

[Dave]

I should know better, if Linda's having a go I should just leave it to the expert. Here's my shot at it. I know I haven't got the eyes right ....

[clickmaniac]

Here's my take on this image...if you like, I'll try to put what I did in words for you

[MarcelSpijker]

My try at this problem.
Hope this is a little like you wanted it to be.

If you are intrested i have the PSD file for you to look at.

[Lorraine]

And here's my effort. Eyes and background no prob. But, the highlights on her face are just soooooooooooo blown, I couldn't do a thing with them. Sorry.

[ldg40]

Well I worked untill 4am on this & gave up! (fear me not Dave, you did a great job!) The only thing I could come up with was to turn this into a painterly-like look.

Suppose that's not what you are after! A too dark image, I can handle, but when the highlights are so hot.... it is indeed a difficult challenge!

Do let us know how this turns out for you! Lord knows we all have images brutalized by the love/hate flash!

Linda :)

PS: No offense to anyones attempts...(kudos to all who have attempted this!) but it seems in my eye that Marcel has done a pretty good job, perhaps dropping the saturation would be helpful?

[down2earth2]

First I'd deal with the background.

The color of the papers posted on the bulletin board should be close to color neutral. I measured the color in Lab color space and got L=55, a=8, b=28. The "L" channel measures no color. L holds all the light and dark information for the photo.

The "a" channel measures all the red and green information. I had a=8. Needs to be fixed! Too red. (A positive "a" value means it's red-ish; a negative "a" value would mean it's green-ish. I remember which is which by thinking "+" means hot (red), and "-" means cool (green forest)).

In the "b" channel I measured b=29! Very yellow! Needs to be fixed! (A positive "b" value means it's yellow-ish; a negative "b" value would mean it's blue-ish. I remember which is which by thinking of yellow as warm "+", and thinking of blue as cool "-").

I would use a Curves Adjustment Layer to fix the color of the background, and then use a mask to limit the adjustment to only the background. The girl needs to be dealt with separately because she's 95% lit up by the cool light of a flash, not the warm red-yellow light of the background lights.

The girl has incredibly great red hair, but the flash has blown out all the color on the left side of her face. The best way for me to fix that would be to get out the 3rd edition of Katrin Eismann's book "Restoration and Retouching", and look up this sweet little technique I remember reading about but I've totally forgotten what it is. Otherwise, I'd do something along the lines of sampling the skin color on her other cheek, paint it over the blown out pixels, maybe playing with Hue/Saturation and the opacity of the layer. I'd be sloppy painting on the color and then use the "Blend If" function on the "Layer Style" dialogue box so it only affects light pixels. Who knows, maybe that's Katrin's technique, but I seem to remember using the "Color Brush".

Oh, and then I'd think about trying to add some appropriate texture the color I just added to her face. That could be challenging.

If I get some time this week, I'll give it a go.

P.S.: If you check color values in rgb color, something color neutral would have equal values for red, green, and blue. Something close to white might measure 5, 5, 5; close to black 95, 95, 95.

[RoseBrideSama]

Wow, so many. I tryed tons of things a got similar results to some of those. I got an Idea to mask her bright skin with another picture of her see what I can do. ( I got it from a blog site that had many pictures, if I can find it again that is.)
:wiggle:
Thank you for all your effort, I will try again with some of your tips!

PS. I just use the red eye tool in Photoshop CS 9 (Under the healing brush tool.) to fix the red eye .

[RoseBrideSama]

Ok, I did a few things, I think I came up with something thats OK. Here are the before and after pictures; It's not perfect but it sure is better then the first. I think the hairs a little off but it looks ( In my eyes.) better then red hair form a bottle.:what:

I couldn't find another picture of this girl, but I found the site.

[down2earth2]

Here's another effort.