Backlighting problem

[bkoopers]

I photographed a band called “The Fire and Reason” in Manhattan last night. After the show, the lead singer, Bella Saona, asked me to take a few photos of her outside on the street in front of a store window that was brightly lighted. I knew this was going to be a problem because with the Sony F717 automatic settings, a figure standing in front of a brightly lit background is going to come out very dark. I tried taking the photos with and without the flash but it made no difference (the subject came out very dark). Unfortunately, I have not had experience with this type of lighting situation and I had no time to figure out what to do.

Here is one of the photos and they came out badly as I expected:

A 2 mb version of the file can be found here:

http://irbl.net/photoshop/bella_saona_backlighting.jpg

What (if anything) can be done in Photoshop CS2 to “fix” the photo?

From reading the F717 users guide, it seems that I should have used the “Spot metering” mode (not the default “Multi-pattern metering”) so the camera only looks at the lighting conditions on the subject.

If you would like to check out my concert photos of The Fire and Reason (plus a photo-shoot that I did on the street during daylight hours) you can see them at this website:

http://thefireandreason.irbl.net

Thanks to anyone who can help me out.

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

This image appears to me to be so badly underexposed that you have lost too much detail to be able to recover it seemlesly.
I made a few attempts at recovering it and the results were poor with low contrast and lots of grain.
The problem is that once the shutter has fired, whatever detail you have is the maximum you will ever have in that shot. You can do lots of tricks like alter the levels and apply curves and even enhance the brightness of certain areas but every operation is likely to reduce detail still further or merely make missing detail more pronounced.
My gut feels is that this is something of a lost cause unless you are happy to accept significant degredation and grain.

Where's Duncdude when you need him?


Trojan.

 

[duncdude]

Here!!!

But i reckon Trojan is right - very underexposed

And as he states (and sometimes frustratingly difficult to explain) the original contains the maximum detail attainable - and altering the image is going to reduce that detail even further

You can see the grain when adjustments have been made:-


Kind Regards
Duncan

 

[bkoopers]

Thanks for trying. Could you please detail the steps you took to adjust the image so I can try it on the other photos in the set to see what they look like?

From the advice I received in a Sony camera forum, it looks like the environment for this photo was a lost cause. If I had used "spot metering" on the subject, it would have resulted in the subject being brighter with more detail but the background (the lighted store window) would have been washed out (it would look like she was standing in from of just a very brite glass box which defeats the purpose of posing in front of that store window).

 

[duncdude]

nothing clever - just played around with the Image - Adjustments - Shadow/Highlight...

i think i brought up the shadows 100% - let us know how you get on


Kind Regards
Duncan

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

If you had taken multiple shots at different exposures you might have been able to use the foreground from one with the background from another to give a better balance without loss of detail in either the foreground or background.



Trojan.

 

[jimoblak]

Her face in the blue channel is nasty: absolutely no definition. Try blurring out the blue channel to smooth it out and then applied the overall level adjustments. But as the face sells a photo, this one is unfortunately not too marketable.

Can you merge photos that were taken with the flash and without? You can often mix exposures for backlighting situations like this.

- - I hope this helps - -
_{(Complain to someone else if it doesn't)}

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

I thought I just said that! ;-)


Trojan.