Challenge Project: Rotten exposure

[LazyPhotographer]

In the other forum there was a thread talking about posting an image (good or bad) and letting people take a crack at how they'd post process it. Well, here's one for you. Anyone game to take a crack at it? All you have is a JPG... so the challenge is even greater!

Mistakenly set the camera to Tv mode. I never wear my glasses when I'm shooting pictures, so it's all a crap shoot anyway. Only this time, I really messed up a good photo op. Or I think, can't really say cuz the pic is too dark. :?

The challenge is to fix the picture *and* to teach/tell everyone how you did it. Any takers?

http://www.onlinephotographers.com/gallery/albums/lazypics_forum/IMG_6691fix.jpg

[Scottes]

Did you take this in RAW by any chance? I'd love to get my hands on the RAW...

[LazyPhotographer]

Nope... just JPG.

[Scottes]

http://www.itsanadventure.com/postimages/IMG_6691fix-ss.jpg

No Color Management attached so I assigned Adobe RGB

Shadow Highlights:
-Shadows 83, 68, 30
-Highlights 47, 66, 75
-Color Correction +17
-Midtone +25

Levels Adjustment 0, 0.83, 226

Select Color Range and clicked on the darkest part of the head, Fuzziness 22

Ctrl-H to hide the marching ants

Shadow Highlight
-Shadow 32, 36, 23
-The others default

Went to Channels, disabled all but Blue

Filter... Blur... Gaussian Blur .8 radius

Enabled all the color channels again

Converted to sRGB

Save for Web

I would have liked to run some more noise reduction against it, like Neat Image, but I felt that was cheating... :)

[Belmondo]

A less aggressive approach....all I did was play with levels just a tad. It was possible to bring out more detail around the eye, but not in any satisfactory way. I thought it was okay because of the strong lighting on the back side of the bird.

Total time: about 1 1/2 minutes. Obvoiusly more can be done, but I think it's important to show what can be done easily.

http://www.bytephoto.com/photopost/data/500/353duck3-med.jpg

[PacAce]

http://tanseikai.com/tanseikai/images/others/IMG_6691fix-b.jpg

1. Make duplicate layer of background

2. Highlight/Shadow:
Shadows: Amount = 80, Width=50, Radius=100
Highlights: Amoun=0, Width=0, Radius=0
Adustments: Color Corr=20, Midtone Cont=0, Blk clp=.01, Wht clp= .01
(I just love this feature of PSCS :) )

3. Magic Wand Tool; tolerance=30, Anti-alias, Contiguous:
Select head of duck

4. Select | Feather=5

5. New Adjustment layer - Levels:
Input Levels=0, 1.56, 255
6. Select | Deselect

7. New Adustment layer - Brightness/Contrast:
Brightness=0, Contrast=+10

8. New Adjustment layer - Hue/Saturation:
Reds: H=0, S=25, L=0
Yellows: H=0, S=17, L=0
Greens: H=0, S=33, L=2
Cyan: H=0, s=0, L=-30
Blues: H=0, S=27, L=-20

9. Layer | Flatten Image

10. Apply sharpening to taste. I applied a little bit of edge shapening plus a wee bit of USM.

Unfortunately, there's a bit of noise in the image. Probably would have come out better with the original file. :)

It was late last nigh when I did this so my brain was getting ready to go into shutdown mode for the night. I should have added one more step to the processing and that step would have been to decrease the noise somewhat with Filter | Noise | Despeckle or for something quick and dirty or spend a little bit more time with a layer and color channel blurring in Lab mode.

[maderito]

- Duplicate image layer; set blending mode to screen
- Duplicate same layer with screen blending mode
- Merge all three layers
- Tweak contrast with levels (increase gamma)
- Correct color casts in curves:
-- blue channel - input 248 ouput
-- green channel - input 131 output 125
- Replace color - select color in waves and shift hue to cyan/blue
- Sharpen with edge mask
- Mask duck (doesn't have to be precise) and run smart blur on water
- Convert to sRGB
http://display.lifepics.com/imgdisp.asp?filespec=%60foxhx2cuxmwdogx%5D9%3C%3D8 %3B9dOjeOrmlfg%7Dep%6097ptq%0C8288%40A%0F4%3A3939