high contrast

[flight1]

How can I improve this photo? Even the pavement beneath the horse has no information. Thanks for your help. Tom

[Mike]

At the risk of being taken as a wise #ss, reshoot it.

I have never had much luck trying to do anything with a large area of 255 or higher(!). If there is no information, you can not change it. There are some procedures for putting in new information in those areas, but I think it almost always looks like its been worked on. (I try to work on the idea that if you can tell its been retouched, then I have failed).

Mike

[T Paul]

1. Open the image
2. Press Alt-Control-~ (Mac-Option-Command-~). This is a shortcut that automatically loads a selection of the highlights in your image.
3. When the highlight selection loads, if there are any highlights that you don’t want, use the lasso subtraction option to select and remove them.
4. When you are happy with your selection and while it is still active, press Control-J (Mac Command-J) to place the highlights on their own layer.
5. Change the layer blending mode of the highlights to Multiply. This really brings back a lot of detail in the background and horse, but didn’t do much to the ground area.

Creating a new ground layer:
1. Since the ground was completely blown out, I just added a new layer under the main image and selected an area to match the ground then filled with a light brown.
2. Change the main image’s mode to multiple to activate the brown layer below it. Next switch to the brown layer and erase the areas that overlapped the main image such as the areas under the horse’s legs and shrubs.
3. Next to make the new ground more realistic, I applied a sandstone texture to it with the texturizer filter. I duplicated the layer and slightly changed the color and change the mode to overlay and adjusted the opacity until I was happy with the results.
4. Finally, I cloned one of the back hoofs to add lost detail to the front hoofs.

[rondon]

I'd never used those shortcuts T Paul and I really like them... now to remember.

anyhow I gave a shot at adding surface..making a duplicate layer after using your procedure... then selected and remove the ground with the wand..
then inserted a sand layer between and lowered it opacity...

I did pretty much the same with the shadow separately... 1st removing it then pasting it back in before lowering the opacity.
RonDon

[T Paul]

Nicely done RonDon! That's the great thing about computers, you can piece images together. I like the sandy ground that you added. You can pretty much add any element from any image that you have. So flight1 if you have any other photos that you like the ground in, you can try taking the ground from them and adding them to this image.

[flight1]

Originally Posted by T Paul

Nicely done RonDon! That's the great thing about computers, you can piece images together. I like the sandy ground that you added. You can pretty much add any element from any image that you have. So flight1 if you have any other photos that you like the ground in, you can try taking the ground from them and adding them to this image.

Thanks for the help. It's just what I needed. Tom