Bad Photo: What would you do?

HosieMosie · Joined: 22 Sep 2006 Posts: 5

Hiya, hoping someone can share some of their wisdom with me and give me some advice on this photo... it was taken by my partners dad - hence the dodgyness, and for one reason and another it can't be retaken.

I was wondering what I could do (if anything) to get a reasonable shot out of it? It doesn't have to be a perfect photograph, but just something printable...whether it looks slightly artistic etc is fine.

So far I've had a go at adjusting the levels and got it a bit lighter but I thought it would be easier for suggestions if I just left it as the original.

Any input would be greatly appreciated, I know its a terrible picture!

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=250356097&context=set-72157594296021014&size=l

Excruciating

Hmm ...
I'm just going to name a couple of things that could lighten it a bit, levels (as you said), the dodge tool (on low opacity so you can control it), contrast/brightness or make a new lay (Make sure theres a "v" in something about 50% natural grey colored something-something.. (can't remember all things xD) It's down at the bottom when you make a new layer). Set the blending mode to overlay, take out a soft brush with white as foreground color, set the opacity of the brush to around 10 and start coloring light areas..

Hope some of this helps, your pictureis VERY dark though ..
I think it was harder to actually make this picture so dark than it will be to brighten it.. Look at that lamp in the top left.. shines more than the sun!

Oh yeah ! Try and dublicate the picture on different layers and change blending modes to "lighten", "soft light" etc..

HosieMosie · Joined: 22 Sep 2006 Posts: 5

Excruciating

Yeah, sounds like some good thinking there Wink

Medley · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 5:07 pm Post subject: Re: Bad Photo: What would you do?

While working, keep an eye on the histogram. Gaps in the histogram will likely lead to banding in the print. Some banding will probably be unavoidable, so you'll have to find a balance.

Also, if you Command-click the RGB channel in the channels pallette, you can create a selection based on luminosity. It won't help much initially, but may come in handy once you get some detail back.

-Medley.

Medley · Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 6:34 am Post subject: Re: Bad Photo: What would you do?

OK, I hope you don't mind, but I downloaded the image to play with it a bit. After playing around for awhile, I came up with a relatively decent image that has a surprisingly good histogram. First, here's the image:

Now, here's what I did to the original:
1) Image>Mode>Lab Color. The main problem with the image is that it's way too dark. Converting to Lab color puts the entire problem into one channel- the Lightness channel.

2) Levels adjustment on the Lightness channel. Go to the Channels pallette, select the Lightness channel, and go to Image>Adjustments>levels.(Cmd+L) I used the values 0,1.89,128.

3)Still in the Channels pallette, CMD-click the Lab Channel thumbnail. This makes a selection based on luminosity. The lghter a pixel is, the more it is selected. I actually wanted the dark pixels, so go to Select>Inverse (Cmd+Shift+I)

4)Copy the selection to a new layer: Layer>New>Layer via Copy (Cmd+J) Set the blend mode of the layer to screen. Merge the two layers: Layer> Merge Down (Cmd+E)

5) Convert the image back to RGB color. Image>Mode> RGB Color.

There you have it. The only real downside is we've blown out a few of the highlights around the light, but that can be fixed with cloning and such. The histogram has a few spikes, but no real banding. In fact, it's good enough to allow more editing. I thought I'd leave that to you. Just keep an eye on the histogram, and you should be fine.

Hope this has helped.

-Medley.

HosieMosie · Joined: 22 Sep 2006 Posts: 5

Hi Medley and thanks for your reply! That is a big help Very Happy

I can see I'm going to learn a lot here...

The original pic I have on the pc is even bigger again so I'm going to have a go at your instructions too and see what I come up with.

Thanks again,
Lorna.

tinamou · Joined: 24 Sep 2006 Posts: 1

Hi,

Here's what I could do with it in color . If you want it doing in B&W thaen just let me know.

Techniques used were simply:

Open
Copy
Levels adjustment
Change blending to screen
Laso around part of ceiling (Light very areas) for blending
Copy
paste in to new layer
Change pasted layer to exclusion
Reduce noise

Hope it helps,

Tinamou

Color

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