Below is an image of a county wrstling champion taken in a gym, all lights out except the spot light over the mat. I had strobes, bouncing off the ceiling. I was very happ with all photo - except the brackets that reflected too much light.

What can I do to these photos so that the photos look "normal" and not shiny?

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Please be specific as possible, as i am a super noob to cs3

It's a matter of what one likes...
I adjusted "levels"
then I made a duplicate copy and changed the layer to multiply and brought down the opacity to 50%...then provided a slight adjustment to sharpness.

thanks, I was thinking of that, but I wanted to keep the exact photo and just touch up the white poster board so it looked "normal." I may be printing them out at 20x30.

thanks.

Try this... pretty simple....... use the highlight slider in shadow/highlight in Photoshop
on a duplicate layer and hide all layer mask and paint in the board.

Wolfman, that was a good 1 and easy.

Here's my best result:

1) Dup Layer
2) Select Color range (white on brackets)
3) Lasso Tool to deslect everything but the board
4) tried to get as close to fingers as possible
5) Image > Adjust > Exposure
-- Exposure -0.4 -- Offset 0 -- Gamma 0.75
6) Image > Adjust > Levels
-- Black and white to edge of histogram
-- Output Level 50
7) Image > Adjust > Curves
-- Grey Smapler and choose a darkler grey from a background shirt (made it almost white)

Merge Layers and done.

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Going to try your way now :)

Final Product
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good job...I wanted to try again...didn't realize what you were wanting...I did basically what you did...I captured the poster...adjusted layers just on poster...did a separate adjustment on inverse of poster...I then slightly blurred the pic and then masked out the person and poster.

thanks for your help. This was a nice positive first post (thread) here! :)