Harsh Sideways Flash Shadows, Off White BG

[tobeconfirmed]

Hey guys,

My photography boss just rang me today asking me if I could try and save some images in photoshop that one of her other photographers have taken.
They're staff pictures, and I'm not going to lie - they're stressing me out. I'm not the most intricate of people, and can't stand long periods of sitting drawing with the pen tool - especially when the effect is barely realistic in the end anyway. Anyway the problem was that whoever took them has evidentally just bent their flashgun to a 90 degree angle while holding the camera in portrait mode, without redirecting it towards the ceiling.

So far I've been tracing around the curves on the shadowed side with the pen tool and then cloning out the shadow with the (thankfully plainish background), this isn't too bad for clothing and objects but when it comes to hair it's just way way to neat an edge, especially considering the other side is natural looking (I'm considering just pen tooling them both and being done with it), however I thought that I might as well if any one knows of a better technique with more realistic results, to at least tone down and soften the shadow, if not remove it completely.

I really don't want to spend my weekend tracing around sillhoettes for what are quite possibly the most boring photos ever.

Before anyone asks, no I don't have RAW files because 'they take up too much space' *heavy sigh*. =-(

[Daviskw]

Why not just paint a few hairs in where needed? I just used pen pressure in shape dynamics then sampled some color and painted them in.


Butch

[tobeconfirmed]

I'm a bit of a newbie to the pen tool, I only really got round to using it during masking for a video editing experiement, where do I find the shape dynamics - I'm guessing (from pen pressure), that you were using the pen tool?

Nick