any help with this photo

my wife took this photo today of my sons kickboxing club and a well known diy store. the photo is atrocious and was just wondering if there was any way it could
be made better. i messed about in lightroom but unsure what im doing. any help much appreciated

Oh wow.

IF you have a raw file, then you may have something to save. But if this is jpg only, then I'm afraid this will be really hard to recover.

This is what I could pull with it, I converted to b/w because the skin is still white, and the blue way over the top when I tried to pull it down.

I would try running it thru canons DPP software, it may be able to rescue a bit more, this was an older adobe program.

Is it raw or JPG? You can try lowering the exposure and lowering the recovery/highlights slider, but it probably won't help much unless she shot in RAW.

It reminds me of my mother's toast. No matter what you requested as far as doneness, everybody in the family got it black. It was up to you to scrape it with a butter knife to your desired doneness.

hi thanks for the reply. it was shot in raw but, i wouldn't have a clue how to sort it out. i'm sort of at the pressie button stage in lightroom hoping something nice will happen lol

Well you should see a slider named exposure and another slider called highlights or recovery, I believe. Wiggle them until it gets darker.

Bearmann wrote in post #17640612
Well you should see a slider named exposure and another slider called highlights or recovery, I believe. Wiggle them until it gets darker.

done that but faces are still too light. will have to try and arrange for me to take a picture

If you pushed both of those sliders to their full extent, then that's all there is to recover. Good thing that a re-take is an option. Not sure how she did that. Usually an automatic exposure setting would do pretty well in this light.

thanks for the help

try bringing the exposure slider down first, and then the highlight/bright/recov​ery exposure(depending on the version of LR) still may get it decent as a black and white, but probably not in color.

If after all doing all that has been advised above, the faces are still light, you can click on the gradient tool on top right corner and then overlay a dark ND gradient (not as a gradient but to cover the entire image uniformly) that will give you additional flexibility to bring exposure down.

At this point, if you can upload your original raw file ( to dropbox or similar) and provide a link, then I am sure many here will be able to help you quickly in getting the best that's possible out of this image.

Good luck.

Can you post the RAW file to Dropbox or other service so we can take a swing at it? The jpeg is simply too blown to recover much of anything from (and the RAW may be, too) but RAW has more latitude in it for recovering blown out portions.

Good Lord, why can't all photoshop advice be like that!!!!!

ouch...i would say too much is lost. The information is just not there to recover. Maybe just do another photo?

hopefully done it right

Do you have similar photos of them we could steal their faces from?