Too Dark/Light Areas

[vmf]

Hello, I am an Elements user for all of 2 days. I would like to start by improving the attached photo which has areas that are too light on the face & arm of the child, and a dog that is too dark. Any advice would be appreciated.

[TommyO]

First, welcome to RP ! Hope you find it useful.

Since you're new to Elements, simpler is probably better.
I believe Elements contains the same utility as the full blown Photoshop suite, called "Shadow/Highlights". It should be under Enhance>Lighting. It usually does an admirable job. Anything beyond that gets into adjustment layers and masking. So, try that first and let us know. It appears a few pixels on the girls face are too light to be recovered... essentially "blown out". You may have to clone or heal those.

[vmf]

Thank you for your help, I'm sure this site will be an excellent resource for me. I'll try play around with the shadow/highlights feature this evening.

[Helena]

I guess the main problem with this photo (which I hope you have at higher resolution) is that it looks like there's not enough information in the dark bulk of the dog to give you lighter details there...so you may never get the dog right without some 'artwork' on your part. (drawing in missing information).

You can certainly do as the previous poster said but you face another challenge in that the lighting varies across the picture. Bad developing? Exposure to sunlight? You might want to create 2 layers of the original picture and adjust one to get the dog right and one to get the baby right and then slowly crossfade from one to the other. (erase the parts you don't want of the top layer with a blurred edge brush) This way you can optimize them both.

In my version I also did some extra burning (darkening) of the baby and the sand in the bottom left to keep the focus on the baby.

[Helena]

Oh...forgot to mention that I also used the Enhance-Auto Sharpen to make everything a bit crisper.

Good luck!