Sunshine on top of head

[karenjean]

Hi everyone, this is my first time shooting a senior. This is right out of the camera, nothing done to it yet any CC would be great. I did save it as a jpg to upload here. Her hair is so blond and the sun was right on top of her washing out the top of her head. This session started at 9:15 in the morning and was over at 10:30. It was suppose to rain or either be cloudy that day. It turned out to be a really nice sunshiny day I did shoot in raw, so the original photo is saved in raw format. I had the camera set on AV, the Exposure ranged from 1/800,1250,1600 @ f/4.5. I have lightroom and CS3, any suggestions?????

Thanks everyone,
Karen

[Wolfman]

Open your raw image in CS3 and use the recovery slider to get back some of the blown out hair. Then open the image in PS and use the highlight slider in the shadow/highlight tool to recover more lost highlight. I tried this and recovered her hair. I also used layers and layer masks in those processes.

http://img176.imageshack.us/my.php?i...203copyom0.jpg

[karenjean]

Wow that's so much better thank you so much. It sounds really easy, but I've learned what sounds easy doesn't really mean it's easy.

Thank you
Karen

[Wolfman]

Originally Posted by karenjean

Wow that's so much better thank you so much. It sounds really easy, but I've learned what sounds easy doesn't really mean it's easy.

Thank you
Karen

It's easy if you are fairly familiar with those tools that I mentioned.

[moonchild64]

I made a few changes such as bringing out the details a bit more. I think that is a matter of preference. Personally, I like the softer look on most portraits but I figure it never hurts to have more options.

Anyways, I am new at this so go easy on me. LOL Maybe I did something right.

Oh yeah ... instead of the 100kb picture, if you want to get to the full image go here:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a2...64/Blonde1.jpg

*note* I have read the msg. on how to resize for this forum, but I am apparently not able to grasp something within that message. Everytime I try to get the picture down to 100k it ends up looking awful. Sorry.

[DCobb]

This is my try on the picture.

dc

[Flora]

Hi Karen!!

Welcome to RetouchPRO!!!

After replacing the blown out sky, I used:

• Shadow/Highlight
• Levels
• Clone Tool
• Hue/Saturation

Attachment 2 = a more saturated and vibrant version.

Let me know if you'd like a more detailed explanation.

[Verywierd]

I tried what everyone else did, but it left her face and the front of her body looking so dull. So I decided to let the hair stay at the edge of burn out after I had cloned some texture back into the burnt out spots, and brightened up her front to match. I added the blue sky and clouds and then a graduated yellow to the top for a late afternoon look. Contrast adjustments and a very tiny red glow to the skin curve on blank layers and gaussian blur blended in overlay mode. Cropped the image to 4:3.

[TommyO]

Karen,
When working on multiple images, all with similar issues, you may want to examine how you approach the edits in general... what we call adjust your workflow.

- You should make all exposure edits in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) first. At least do adjustments found on the General tab, as those are the most important;
- Work on similarly exposed images, save your adjustments and apply to all images in one batch saving you bunches of time;
- Then bring the image into Photoshop (PS) and do your final tweaks; you can even record your most basic steps as an Action (just read the help dropdown on automating tasks) so you don't have to repeat them for each image, i.e. duplicating the background, adding adjustment layers, converting to 8-bit, etc. Whatever you think is common to all; you don't have to make the tweaks, just have the layer there waiting so you can work quickly.