Need help on this photo.

I want to get rid of the heavy contrast of shadow/light in this photo. I'd like to bring both extremes a little closer together. How would I go about doing this?

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PS shadow/highlight
Lightroom fill light

but when you're taking the picture to start with, look at the lighting, that is easily avoidable

That's going to be tough with this image.. If you shot in raw, you can process 2 images... bump up the exposure on one of them to lighten the dark side of her face,

and reduce the exposure on a second copy to soften the highlights on the bright side.

Import both copies into Photoshop and put them together on searate layers... Erase the dark side of the top layer and see if you get a good match at that point. If you like it,
then merge the layers together and then start working with levels, and clone tool to bring it all together ia bit more...

Good Luck...

Thanks a lot. I am sleepy now, but I will try these in the morning. Cheers.

Rob.

It may take a little experimentation on your part but one suggestion is to copy your image to a second layer in Photoshop and change blend mode to Screen. Copy the Red Channel from the original image (because it has greater contrast than the other color channels). Using Levels, alter the Red channel with the intent of creating something that will later be used as a layer mask. I used the black dropper to more clearly delineate the areas where the original image would poke through and the white areas where the Screened layer would show through. Additional steps: invert the modified Red channel (which should now be either all black, white, and a little grey for areas where there's a need for a smooth transition between shadows and highlights). Apply a small amount of Gaussian Blur. Add a Layer mask to the 2nd, Screen-mode layer. Load the Red channel as a selection so you can leave the light areas as is, and allow the Screen mode to brighten the overly dark areas of the image.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, here is the quick and dirty attempt I made. I don't know if it is remotely close to what you were after however.

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I added just a smige of sharpening to the right side of her face.

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Some fill in flash would have certainly helped at the time of taking this shot.

It is very difficult to balance it out completely because there is a large contrast range between the right and left side. Trying to reduce the edge and harshness of the shadow edges can be very difficult and time consuming.

I tried to do some adjustments but found it time consuming to remove the edge harshness of the shadow line. See my attempt on the forehead? More time and some blending effects on the stamp tool will help.

You may be able to spend more time on it than I did

EDIT: Sorry, you wanted to know what to do. This is what I did:

- Quick mask on the left hand side. Used varying opacity depending on how dark/light the skin areas are.
- Inversed the mask and applied some levels and curves
- Desaturated the colour in the whites of the eye
- Used stamp tool in "multiply" blending mode to remove the brightness on the forehead
- Used the pattern tool and the stamp tool to try and remove some of the harsh line on the forehead
- Then used shadow/highlight tool on the overall image
- Used noiseware to remove the noise
- Sharpened the image.
- Saved for web so some compression on the image

EDIT: Sorry! You don't have "Image Editing Ok" switched on. Hope it was ok with you to have a go?

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