Help With Over Exposure

[dmu]

I took a great shot of an Egret flying over dark water. His back and the top of

his neck and head are overexposed. When I bring the image up in Canon's Digital

Photo Pro, and choose the linear option for fixing the exposure, the whole

picture darkens, and I can see feathers on the back. This means that the detail

is there, just overexposed. How can I fix the egrets back and neck to see those

feathers?

[bernardwest]

Hi Darren. If you had Lightroom, this would be very easy to fix. With DPP you will probably have to develop the Raw file twice, once for highlights and once for everything else, and then merge them in photoshop using layers and masks. The trick is to keep some contrast in the highlights so they don't look too flat once rescued.

[mattholmes]

Fastest easiest way would be to open the image in the new bridge cs3 and use try the recover slider. Next easiest option: open it in photoshop and mess around with the sliders in the shadow/highlight tool.

[dmu]

Thanks, I will try it.

[david_simonds]

Darrin, you should also try curves in the "luminosity" setting. Sometimes the "auto" function does wonderful things. On occasion it is better than the Shadow/Highlight tool that Matt suggests.

[digitaldog]

Its not over exposed if you retain the highlight detail you wish. It might look over exposed

with one set of default rendering settings but by pulling the exposure slider down, IF you

can now see all the detail you wish, it was properly exposed. True over exposure is

highlight detail you wanted to capture that isn't able to be rendered at any setting because

of sensor over saturation (over exposure)

 

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

 

Andrew Rodney

Author "Color Management for Photographers"