Removing intense white saturation.

[matthewjc82]

I was wondering what I would need to do to eliminate the harsh white saturation from a photograph like this, and are ther any tricks to bring back detail as well. Image is attached.

[Swampy]

You can start with a Shadow/Highlight adjustment....

"Intense white" as you call it is generally referred to as "blown out". There is no (or very little) detail information to draw from 'cause it's been blown away.

[chillin]

You could also try levels with masking.

[Juergen D]

Maybe like this (see layers).

Juergen

[TommyO]

matthew,
It would appear the is some very subtle detail remaining. However, Swampy is basically correct. If you move the eyedropper over those areas and there is no change in the color values (maxed out at some value, i.e. 255,255,255), then no amount of recovery will help.

If the image was taken digitally it has a better chance. Especially if in a raw format. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) can recover detail from highlights that do not show up in the converted image. While you can open jpeg's in ACR, you cannot recover highlights from them. Sorry.

Otherwise, you could clone other parts of the dress very lightly into those areas to reproduce it.

[0lBaldy]

It would be nice to know what enhancement software you are working with so we could optimize the "tricks" available for your particular software
Try working with high resolution pictures.. A much higher resolution color scan might help bring out some detail and be much easier to work with.. you can post a link here in this thread to the site that is hosting your larger version, but if details are not there, then they are just not there.

Tonemapped~Masked Levels

[Verywierd]

A duplicate layer run through the Contrast Master plugin and painted into the original with a mask. A few small clone tool touches on the blank spots.