My wife took recent pictures of my daughter outside on some walking trails and the light and dark areas from the sun and shadows from trees are very distracting and ruin otherwise good pictures. I have been trying but can't come up with a good way to mask the areas of difference due to the extreme contrast. I'm not trying to remove the shadows completely but would just like to darken the light areas. Balance it out so it's not so distracting.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

I generated a contrast mask and it looks better. Still a lot of variance across shadows and highlights. Also, there are a number of "blow outs" in extreme highlights.

Somebody else can probably do a better job, but I'm going to bed. :-)

worked with two layers adjusted the top layer using curves and brightness.then applyed opacity to the top layer,the problem is that the face is a bit burnt out by the light

Hi Jim,

... the only other way to try to minimize that, beside the great tip from Mark, is a labour of love ... meaning either 'borrowing' good parts from the picture, pasting and adapting them on the blown out spots ... or very carefully using the clone Tool set to darken cloning from good areas to cover the bad ones ...

:wavey:

What Flora said ... ;)

I played a little. Either a lot of serious restoration work, or for pretty sunlight do control-alt-tilde(~) to select highlight, control-J to copy to new layer. Do gaussian blur on the new layer - pretty heavy and change to soft light blending mode. Now it looks like pretty glowwy sun insteaad of harsh sun ;)

Roger

No Kidding! This has got some nasty blowouts. I did much the same thing. Ctrl-Alt ~ and darkened. Ctrl-Alt ~ and lightened. Slight dodge on shadow on face.

Cheers
Dave

Sorry about the delayed response but I had a very busy weekend. Thanks for all of the tips I'm going to try and see what I can come up with. I was playing with a mask I created using a threshold on a copy of a channel, then blurring it, load the selection then feather and it worked pretty well. I've got about 7000 pics of her so it's probably not worth the time to try and repair the blown out sections. I'll post my results here and you guys can tell me what you think.

Thanks again
Jim