I'm trying to adjust the light in this picture, but I can't do it without making the picture seem really washed out. I've tried the brightness/contrast and the hue and saturation, but I can't seem to make it look right.

It is really dark, so I'm not sure how much can be done.
But I like to adjust levels and then add a duplicate of the background and set to screen or softlight - adjust the opacity to taste

I took a look at the photo and it's not difficult to lighten with levels or cs's shadow/highlights, also tried several layers in screen mode. All lightened the photo without washing it out, but the noise will have to be contended with.

I'm no expert but one way to do it is to duplicate the image and set the blend mode of the duplicate to screen you can duplicate it as many times as needed and then use a curves adjustment.

The attached photo was duplicated 4 times using screen made.

I first ran the image through the plugin by Kodak called Digital Roc. Good color but noise was a problem. Did an adjust on a duplicate image using levels and put the two images together but lowered the opacity to about 32% for one of them. Next I did a merge visible and worked on that layer. The noise seems to be most pronounced in the blue channel so I reduced the noise in that channel and the image in general. Did a slight sharpening and surface blur.

dc

The single image is the noise reduction being done by Neat Image.

2 Copies of original both set to screen, a surface blur, a highpass overlay to sharpen and a curves adjustment

Great job with the colours DC! Cassidy you did well with the noise but it looks a little blurred now.

Sincerely Syd

Hi,

Here is the link (http://www.aim-dtp.net/) where You can find an rgb profile what You can assign to the picture in photoshop. It rgb space contains linear gamma.

saby

Levels, Neat Image, Local Contrast, Neat Image again, Curves. Sadly, it contains motion blur.

Great work LonK