White Out On Face

[AndrewR]

Hi everybody, I was wondering if anyone could help me. Recently my colleague came to me to see if I could possibly do something with this picture ie get the faces back in it as the sunshine from outside has kind off ruined it. It is a picture of her two brothers one of which has saddly passed away since. I am working on it but getting nowhere fast.

So if anyone could possibly help me and my colleague I would be more than grateful, also a small tutorial on how you done it would also be thankful

Thanks In Advance To Everyone That Can Help

[Swampy]

A tough one when there is sentiment involved.

I'm not a photo retuocher in the sense that I can restore people's faces, but there are some color correction techniques that help restore some of the detail. This is VERY quick, but a step forward.

Duplicated the original and ran PSCS Highlights and Shadows on the copy working on the blown out highlight. Set that layer to Multiply (at 100% opacity) and then added a black mask and with low opacity white brush started painting on the blown out areas to bring up the detail. Ran a small gausian blur on the mask

Duplicated the masked layer and set that to about 30% opacity.

Duplicated again and set opacity at about 30% opacity.

At this point it would take someone far more skilled than me to clone/copy etc. the missing areas of the left guy's cheek, ear and eye etc.

This is a start though.

[creeduk]

I had a go this morning and was not going to post it as I did not get far but I reconsidered. For the worst effect (person on left) I copied the better half of his head and flipped around, and blended it back in that gave a slightly easier time pulling some detail back from the over exposed areas. From there I multiplied just the face areas (either layer copy or add levels and change to multiply mode) Finally a small amount of the burn tool to bring back a little more depth and also tried to reduce the glare a little. Really you need to fix the windows in the door to help a lot so if you had other images that have the details of the doors/windows that would help a lot.
The image resolution is too small in this example to be really effective but you get a general feel for the method.

[Swampy]

Overall, it's a good lesson to folks taking pictures. Neutral background! Even if you are the one being photographed, do your amature photographer a favor and check this kind of stuff for them. A few steps to the photographer's left would not have had this outcome. Sigh....

[Daviskw]

Hi there

I gave it a try as well... All the shadow/highlights, multiply and such brought out a lot of noise. I decided to try and just reduce the glare and add back some detail where I could. I mostly just copied and pasted bits here and there and used a clone tool to copy darkened pixels. I turned off the aligned feature on the clone tool. By adding back the curtains and edges on the window it made the glare look a lot reduced.

Butch