This is a picture of my son Rick (his Capt, Lt, sniper, spotter and medic) taken last month in Afghanistan atop an 8800 ft peak on the Pakistan border. It was taken with a tiny digital camera and badly overexposed. I've gone about as far as I can go with it but would like to be able to get rid of some of the facial shadows and see the men more distinctly. Anyone?

If you have Photoshop CS you can use Image:Adjustments: Shadows/Highlights or a DavidJasek action based on Katrin Eismanns Fill Flash technique. David can be reached at davidjaseck@cs.com or you might find the action in one of the Actions websites. Either way, you'll probably have to mask the faces and paint the rest of the image with a low opacity black brush.

Cheers
Dave

which one is he ?

Very nice! The eagle is a great touch. Rick is the one front-center with his arm across the rock outcropping.

Although the picture is very pixelated, I was able to get a little detail in the faces.

Converted to cmyk, copied the black channel and made it a new luminosity layer at 80%, masked out everything but the faces.

It only took a few minutes, I'm sure you will get better results.

Very nice...you're right about the photo being very pixelated. I think the camera was a 1.2 megapixel and the photo was sent as a jpg file to Hawaii (Rick's wife and kids). It took him 3 hours to send it from Kandahar where he had a 24-hour R&R. Thanks for the help.

Try the following to get a little light into the shadows.

1. Duplicate Image to a new layer.
2. Desaturate new layer.
3. Invert layer and set blend mode to soft light.
4. Apply layer mask, then using soft white brush paint onto mask in areas you wish lightening.
5. Adjust layer opacity to get appropriate amount of lightening.

This improved lighting on your posted image, but could not bring back facial detail in such a small image, however it should be effective on the full size image.

best of luck.

That worked really well...thank you ever so much for the "mini tutorial".

Am I missing something here Wayne?

Dave

If you are Dave, it passed me by too.

I just looked at my thread again, and i see what you mean. I don't know how i managed to put that in. I must have copied and pasted and not noticed what i had done. Oh i am so sorry
Wayne

This is what I learned from J. Kost in one of her tutorials.
1. Opened a curves adjustment layer
2. Moved the slider up (lower left, from dark to lighter
3. When I was satisfied with the faces I clicked OK, (at this point don’t worry about the rest of the photo being to light)
4. On the layer mask, use the brush tool, and paint with black all of the image you want to bring back.
This really worked well for me, and you can still adjust the photo to how light and dark and with what detail you want.
W. Rose

No worries Wayne. I thought it was pretty funny though! Your Curves suggestion is simple and effective.

Cheers
Dave

Thanks Wayne, that fits more with your image, or it would if your image were still posted. Unfortunately when you removed your faulty post you also removed your image, so others probably don't understand what we're talking about here.

Here is the photo per my instructions above.
W. Rose

Dave and Gary,
I think i finally got this one right about uploading and putting the right message and instructions in.
W. Rose

Looks good to me Wayne, keep up the good work.

Hi - I used Gary's instructions and then furthered it by flattening the image and running a quick auto-level to remove that cold contrastly bluish tone.

Great method Gary..

Brad

Hi Brad,
Looks good, very nice job.
W. Rose

The method is not mine, just one I've picked up somewhere, probably here on RP. Look around the tutorials section, it's a veritable treasure trove of technique.

Thanks so very much for all of your inputs. Sorry I didn't get back to you all sooner but this has been a chemo-week so I've been a bit under par. I will say that the phantom tutorial did have me questioning my dosage levels :lmao:

Thanks again,
Wayne

Fill Flash, mask, and levels adjustment.

Catia

Catia,
Nice job, i like it. Tried your method but by using shadow/highlights in place of fill flash. Thanks for another way to do it.
W. Rose (Wayne)