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recovering highlites


tobey bilek

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I made this with a digi cam this summer. It has some problems including zoom lens distortion and highlites out of control on the sunlit floor. I tried burning them down and all I got was lime green color.

 

I used PTLens to correct the distortion. The straight lines no longer curve.

 

Next I used PSE 2 fill flash to lighten the dark elemints in the scene. Then brightness/contrast to darken the whole pic and increased the contrast a little to get a decent looking shadow/highlite representation.

 

Blown highlites seem to be a problem with digi cams, and this is a pretty easy fix without going to high dynamic range multiple image techniques.

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Hi Tobey!

 

Blown highlights are a problem I suffer too, and I think it may be even worse in my case using film.

 

PSE3 added a "Shadows/Highlights" function that PSE2 did not have. I've used it frequently to bail me out of situations like yours.

 

Here's what it did with your original image above:

 

Thanks.

 

Allan

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I like the 'Adjust Lighting' tool of PSE 2.0 as well but i use iCorrect to adjust hightlights on jpegs preferably.

I don't know if PTLens works with Macs. I use ImageAlign but it tends to blur images too much i feel.

Here your original image tweaked by PSE 2.0, iCorrect, ImageAlign and Nikon CSPro for sharpening.

FWIW

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The best way to "Recover" highlights is in the Beta 4 release of Adobe Lightroon. It has a highlight recover control that really works well. If you are familar with the ARC you will recognise the layout of the controls but this is much better! It is better than the ARC and works on all file types! This is great for precision editing/tone mapping and is bonus for your workflow. It is a free download from Adobe and I urge everyone to have a look at it as this version is much better than previous releases.

I predict that it will be the editing app of choice for many photographers and will replace PS, but for many it will live along side PS for use when efficient editing is required for many pics when automation can't be used. Lightroom will also Sync mutiple images if necessary.

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Allen,

 

How does the shadow / highlight control work compared to fill flash? Detail was certainly preserved at both ends of the range after you finished and the contrast was like the original.

 

Hi Tobey.

 

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you, as I see you've already moved on to another shadows/highlights image in another thread.

 

The "Fill Flash" looks to me to operate the same as "Lighten Shadows". And as far as I can tell, the "Recovery" function in Lightroom is the same as "Darken Highlights" in Elements and in full Photoshop. After all, it is the same company (Adobe) putting out the products we're comparing.

 

Even with only a casual glance you can see the same "problems" with the application...the "graininess" that I personally interpret as noise is still there.

 

Here's what the picture looks like with a whirl of the Lightroom Beta4 for Windows, which I too would encourage you to download and try during its test phase. It is a nice tool to augment the PSE2 you already have, and it's free (for now)!

 

Thanks.

 

Allan

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