vertical shadow...can it be fixed?

[mimiya]

As you can see from these two photos I have a problem with my flash. First, can someone please tell me what is going on with this shadow? They are shot vertically, and my guess is that I needed to use a bracket (didn't) and diffused the flash. I am shooting with an N80 and SB-25 TTL.

Anyways, can this be fixed in PS so the photo is useable??

[LactoBeeZor]

I agree with both statements you made about cause and effect. As far as PS correcting it....is this more what you want? I went to fileters, render, lighting effects, and chose an omni light and placed it over the male and combined the layers.

[CJ Swartz]

I found the lighting too strong on the bride and too little on the groom, so I duplicated the original layer twice and set the top layer to Multiply in the layer blend mode to bring the bride's skin tones back. Then I applied a layer mask and brushed out the effect on the groom to bring him back to the original too dark look. Then I desaturated the second duped layer, inverted it (Control-I in PShop), set its layer blend to Overlay, and then used a strong Gaussian Blur -- watching the changes as I strengthened the blur. This is a Contrast Mask, and is designed to tone down hot spots and open up shadows while retaining saturated color. RetouchPRO has a tutorial for Contrast Masking link here:Contrast Masking

[Bill M]

Here is another way. I mad three curves adjustment layers:
1. Darken the bride
2. Lighten the groom's left side
3. Lighten the groom's right side
Then used the masks (inverted) to paint in the effects.

[tgl]

I once accidentally jogged the shutter speed of my camera to faster than flash sync for a whole series of photos... resulting in 10 or 20 pictures, all of which had the same dark right side.

I used the technique that Bill describes: I created a layer to adjust curves, with a gradient for the mask. The advantage of this is that it is easy to use the layer repeatedly if there are many pictures that you have to fix.

For your picture, two layers with inverse masks (one to tone down the bride, one to tone up the groom), done in Lab mode to avoid color shifts. Note that there is some posterization here -- best to use 16 bits, if you have it.

[Mr.Ed]

Ok heres what I did hope you like it.

Lasso > feather 8 pix > levels > select invert > repeat on other side going

Darker instead of lighter > deselect > history brush at 15% (feather were the two meet) >

Burn tool large brush set to highlights 17% > saturation 3% > one last fine tune of levels.


Also when you bring up the level of light the back starts to pixilate.


run a small blur brush around to kill that.