Help fixing pics - help!

My wife took the camera on a field trip w/my son's class today (to a real goldmine!) and took a lot of good shots. However, at one point she gave the camera to a friend to take a pic of her, and while holding the camera he managed to set exposure compensation up to 1 1/3!! (His thumb likely rested on the button and accidentally changed the setting. The camera was in "P" mode.)

Of course, many of the pictures are now washed out - way over exposed.

Any hints as to how to clean them up, other than adjusting brightness and contrast in PS manually? I was wondering if there is an automated feature I can make use of to make it easier. I have PS Elements installed now, and also own PS 6, thought I haven't reinstalled it since I redid my computer, as I found that PS Elements was meeting my needs overall. Also have Irfanview, and the Canon software of course.

Thanks,

Dana

I'm no expert but it's my understanding that a blown highlight pretty much has no data. If an entire area is RGB 255/255/255, you can lower the brightness and you'll just have a uniform area of gray. Contrast won't help without some detail to work with.

I suppose this is where shooting in RAW format may help. You can do a linear conversion and try to recover some of the highlights.

Hopefully, someone with more experience than I (and that won't take much) will have a better answer.

This really depends on how badly it is overexposed. If shot in RAW you can use BreezeBrowser's 'Combined' conversion method to help recover some highlights. But most of the time if it's severely blown out there's not much you can do since all of your highlight data has already been lost. Can't recover something that's not there to begin with. If you're really desperate to recover this you would have to fake it and resort to using a color-fill technique to paint parts of the blown-out image. You can find this technique on a lot of Photoshop retouching books.

Dana,
many tools offer an exposure compensation +- an EV value but...this is just a software option that move the RGB value up or down. Your image will look more dark or more bright thats all.
If you shoot with a +1 1/3 EV the risk is that you got clipping in the highlights.
Clipping is irremediably lost whatever conversion process, raw mode doesnt "recover" higlights permitt an highlights expansion to give a better perceptual view that's all (starting with a not clipped image, the data is there).
If you shooted in raw just check the highligts RGB value after opening your linear conversion in a linear space.
If you shooted jpeg in evaluative mode there is about no chance to recover as the internal camera process has already adjusted the right exposure for the whole image.