Mostly Underexposed w/ Super Bright Highlights (snow)

Can you post the photo?

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Only when you can criticize yourself, should you criticize others. Mikes.

Since you have CS6, do a search for "luminosity masking" and you will find many tutorials to help you easily take care of this situation.

Regards,

Paul

Here's a few approaches ..

a. Ctrl-click on the RGB channel in the channels palette, This will give you a selection of the highlights, save the selection to an alpha channel and Ctrl-D to deselect. Now Ctrl-click on the the alpha channel, invert the selection (Shift-Ctrl-I) so that the darken portions of the photo are now selected. Any effects added will only effect the selected area.

b. Select - Colour Range- Highlights with similar steps as above

c. apply Shadows/Highlights in the same fashion

d. With the selection activated on a duplicate, Apply Image/Blue Channel/Multiply at approx. 40% and adjust the opacity

e. Image/Selective Colour/White and adjust the Black slider

f. Duplicate image, Ctrl-click on the alpha channel, Ctrl-J to set a copy of the selection above and change the blend mode of this one to Multiply. You may want to feather the selection prior to making a copy.

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Cheers.
Gary
http://forums.dpreview.com/Galleries/8298604696/photos
http://www.pbase.com/pictek
I like that you can say something stupid to your dog and it will look at you as if to say, " Wow! That's' fascinating. That never would have occurred to me."

I would, but I prefer not to post my RAWs with serial numbers, etc., to public forums. I'll need to figure out how to strip that identifying data, first, at which point I'd be more than happy to share the image.

tex

I'm only going to tell you why you're getting that "bleeding over into adjacent areas" when using the Adjustment brush in LR. It's happening because you have the brush set to automatic masking. LR is unable to recognize enough of a difference in tone, color, or exposure between the two areas to apply the mask accurately along the boarders. Uncheck the Auto Mask box, enlarge the image to 1:1 or greater, set the feather slider to 100% (soft edge) or whatever value gives you the best results, and paint your adjustment masks as accurately as you can. Use short strokes so it's easier to make corrections by switching to the Eraser tool as you work.

Just hold down the Alt (Option) key and the brush will switch to the Erase mode.

With ACR or LR you can hold down the Alt (Option) key while you adjust the Basic module Exposure and Blacks sliders to see the pixels that are overexposed or pure black.  With your images you may need to go back and forth several times to bring up the shadows and blacks without losing the whites or highlights.

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Living and loving it in Bangkok, Thailand. Canon 7D - See the gear list for the rest.

Here's what the original photo looked like when imported into LR:



Mostly underexposed with some very bright (but not blown) highlights on the left

I tried most of the methods suggested in this discussion. Thanks for the helpful suggestions. The closest I got with these suggestions was with Babine's suggestion #a, but it still wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I wasn't satisfied with any of the other attempts, either.

So I decided to give HDR a try again, using EnfuseGUI. This time I exported 5 JPEGS of the original RAW from LightRoom, at -4EV, -2EV, 0EV, 2EV and 4EV, and, importantly, I stripped the EXIF data from the exported files. I'd tried earlier with the same sort of exports, but without stripping EXIF data, and it simply didn't work.

This time, Enfuse gave me a much better starting point, with much brighter mid and dark tones, but without blown highlights. I saved this as a TIFF, imported it into LR 4.3, and continued applying my standard adjustments. Here's what I ended up with:



Mission accomplished - the mids and darks are brightened without totally blowing the bright highlights on the left side. I may play around a bit more with this in LightRoom, but I wanted to share what I've gotten, so far.

Again, thanks for the very helpful tips. I learned a few helpful and new (to me) techniques in this discussion.

tex



A few seconds with Photo Ninja

Try Adobe camera raw. A few minutes with basic sliders. Vic

In my opinion, while I know that there are numerous ways to eventually get the same results, the easiest, at least for this image, is to open a levels adjustment layer and adjust the endpoints of each channel (R,B,G) to the base of the nearest hill ( i.e. right endpoint moved left to base of hill and left endpoint moved right to base of nearest hill).  This will get you pretty darn close to optimum with the least effort.  Here is my result using this method in CS3:

Regards....Allen





That's what I wanted to say: there are endless possibilities. Even snow on fire (which can be altered quickly).

Here just another 2 in a few seconds.

Of course I am doing unjustice to Photo Ninja in this way.

My result, from earlier:

Snow is not gray, no harsh transitions.

Thanks, Fred, but I really dislike the version you've come up with here. The snow in yours looks unnaturally gray compared to my version. It's as if you've suppressed highlights completely, but on an image-wide basis, and that gives the whole image an unpleasant and unrealistic look (to my eye). I ran into this problem when trying to process the image in LightRoom, originally, and it's exactly what I was trying to avoid, really.

Thanks for giving it a go, but the three versions you cooked up with Photo Ninja are my least favorite.

tex

My result: 

Mine is noticeably brighter. Neither has a measurable number of highlights clipped in all three channels.

VicC, thanks for your example. It's much more realistic than the one from Photo Ninja, but it's a bit darker than my result.

I opened up your image and mine in CS6 and compared histograms. My luminosity histogram:

Reasonably well centered, no posterized shadows, insignificant clipped highlights.

Your luminosity histogram:

Definitely biased to the left. The image is noticeably darker with a long highlights 'tail' and a significant number of completely black pixels.

Not a competition, but I did want to show clearly the different results obtained by using different approaches. I believe I came close to your result using standard sliders in LR 4.3, but I wanted the image even brighter, and was unable to get it as bright as I wanted it without ending up with too many blown pixels for my taste.

Thanks for the example!

tex

My result: 

Brighter with fewer clipped pixels.

Allen, thanks for your example. I loaded yours and mine up in Photoshop and compared the Luminosity Histograms. Here's mine:

My image is brighter with 1/4 as many clipped pixels.

Here's Yours:

Yours is close to as bright as I wanted, but it has too many blown pixels for my taste - what I was trying to avoid.

As with VicC's example, yours does look pretty good, until I inspect it closer. It almost appears to me that you and Vic used similar approaches, but you took it a bit further, shifting everything farther to the right. VicC's image ended up too dark for my tastes, but he didn't have any clipped pixels. Your image ended up about as bright as I was hoping, but with too many blown pixels for my taste.

Thanks for your effort and example!

tex

Approach 'G' ..

Moved your original into ACR and increased the exposure to lighten overall as per the histogram; in CS6, I placed colour samplers as shown, considering #1 as white, #2 and #3 as black and used a curves adjustment layer to balance the RGB values of each.

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Cheers.
Gary
http://forums.dpreview.com/Galleries/8298604696/photos
http://www.pbase.com/pictek
I like that you can say something stupid to your dog and it will look at you as if to say, " Wow! That's' fascinating. That never would have occurred to me."

I'd like to thank everyone again for the tips and the examples. One thing that VicC and Allen's examples made clear to me was that my WB was way off. So I worked on that a little, and will post it here, along with the luminosity histogram for the new image - I think it's the best image and the best histogram, yet.

Image w/ improved WB: 

I think this looks pretty good. Bright, good WB, still almost no blown pixels and no posterized black pixels.

And the luminosity histogram:

That's the ticket, I do believe.

tex

I appreciate all of the different methods you shared here. I tried several, but not all of your methods (and several methods suggested by others in the discussion) before I decided to give the pseudo-HDR approach another shot.

I'm a PhotoShop newb, and am still learning my way around LightRoom. The result you got here is probably closest to what I was looking for. I actually played around with those pickers in PhotoShop, but wasn't completely sure what I was doing with them.

I'm going to bookmark this thread for future reference - I learned a number of new things in it. Thanks again for your time and help!

tex

No Adobe here BTW. Corel's software.

I have read through this post and there is many arguments that can be made on either side. I have printed thousands of photos professionally, actually, ten's of thousands, and a little bit of clipping in whites or blacks usually, if not always, looks better. I always use as much of the RGB spectrum as I can unless it is a moody photo, such as extreme high or low key with muted colors.

The bottom line is what the viewer sees as correct.

So here is just one more take. And when you see the histogram, look closely at the values of 0 and 255.





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Only when you can criticize yourself, should you criticize others. Mikes.

photoshop curves and unsharp masks, spot healing brush.