bad camera flashes

[vodds]

Hi all this is my 1st time here, I was wondering what's best way of removing bad camera flashes on photos, my sister will keep taking pictures with the flash on there-fore having a white flash on photos. I use adobe photoshop cs4 and was told try the burn tool but that seems to blacken the flash, anyone got any good tips

[Chain]

example photo?

Adjust the brightness/contrast/colors using e.g. a curves adjustment with a mask.
Also, I find it very useful to create a new layer, then heal (healing brush or clone stamp tool) to cover ugly highlights on the skin caused by bad lighting - and then reduce the opacity of the layer until it looks natural.

Edit:
If the problem is that the background is way to dark, you could try to use the shadow/highlights adjustment to brighten the shadows (duplicate your layer first or make it a smart object).

[vodds]

how do I upload a photo

[mistermonday]

Vodds, welcome to RP. Use the Reply button (not the Quick Reply). Scroll dowb the page to the button labelled Manage Attachments and click it. The hit the Browse button to navigate to the photo you want to upload. Click upload and then close the window.
Size the image to somewhare around 4x6 @72 ppi and save on the highest quality jpeg setting that will get you underneath the 100KB limit or 200KB limit if you are a Patron member.
Regards, Murray

[vodds]

I dont know what you mean when you say 4 x 6 is that pixels or inches also whats 72 ppi dont you mean dpi

anyway here is picture

[mistermonday]

Vodds, what you have is called a specular highlight meaning that the area is completely overexposed to pure white - there is no usable data left in that area. You have a few options. You can crop the image horizontally just above the flash area, but that will mean you will loose the bottom 1/3 of the photo.
Alternately you can fill in the blown out area by copying and pasting from good parts of the same image or copying from another good photo if you have another photo of the same woman wearing that dress or another dress.
Regards, Murray

[vodds]

ok I didnt think much could be done, as I told my sister that she should have turned the flash off on her camera. thanks for reply anyway

[Kraellin]

well, dont give up the ship yet. there is something that can be done. this one took a while, somewhat unexpectedly, but came out decently. not great, but decent.

i color balanced first and that only did part of that job. so, come back to that later.

next was cloning and airbrushing out all that white. a better artist than myself could have made the hands better, but they're not the main focus of the image, so i let them go. you could probably find another image on the web and simply cut and paste in 'new hands' for the lady, and then blend it in, but that's for someone else to do.

the cloning/airbrush/smudge took most of the time. that white, whereas strong in that cluster, also pervades across more of the image, like a really bad gradient, so a lot of blending with existing material had to be done. shadows had to be redrawn in and textures restored here and there.

i also airbrushed some of the green in the suits out. it just wouldnt correct under the color balance, not right, anyways.

normally, i like to use the color balance adjustment layer for work like this, but it just wasnt doing the job. i lightened the faces with dodge, added a brightness/contrast layer and even tried color balance again... not good enough.

so, i brought up 'color mixer'. ah! that did the trick. with all the other tweaks and the stronger color mixer tool, i was able to get something decent in the color balancing. low light images are always a pain in this and with a flash throwing out uneven light, it's even worse.

so, this one took longer than expected. and somewhere in there i also did a mild noise removal and an unsharp mask for a bit of sharpening. it could stand some more sharpening, but any more unsharp mask and it would start to need corrections in other areas. maybe focus magic or one of those could help it without causing more damage.

all in all, if i were doing this for a paying client, i would recommend the crop idea suggested by others to save money and then just work on the color balancing.

edit: and now that i've posted it, i can see some other light/dark issues that i didnt handle. wouldnt be too hard to fix now, but i'll let it go for now.

[vodds]

wow never thought it could be restored, where did you get those hands or did you make them yourself. wished I knew about photoshop cs4 better, I do play around with some old photos. I have now managed to find some tutorials on the net to play around with. just above her hands it looks good, what's that black thing on her jacket, is it suppose to be a pocket with a glove in it. just studying picture I suppose I could have used the ladies hands on the right and cloned them to left lady, but just tried that & it didn't look right. but many thanks for what you did.

[0lBaldy]

Just an additional thought if you decide to crop.. slide the lady on the left a little closer to the other lady just to make a better composition

[Kraellin]

the hands i simply made. they're not that good, but for a quick job, they'll do i made them using clone and airbrush. like i said before, it might be best to find a suitable pair of hands and just clone them in then make whatever adjustments you needed to in order to match them up with the rest of the image.

and thanks

the dark object on the woman on the left's dress, is a cane. if you look below her arm you'll see the rest of it. the part above her arm is the head of the cane.

nice one, OB

[vodds]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

the hands i simply made. they're not that good, but for a quick job, they'll do i made them using clone and airbrush. like i said before, it might be best to find a suitable pair of hands and just clone them in then make whatever adjustments you needed to in order to match them up with the rest of the image.

and thanks

the dark object on the woman on the left's dress, is a cane. if you look below her arm you'll see the rest of it. the part above her arm is the head of the cane.

nice one, OB

Oh Yes i can see now its a cane on ladies arm on left, thanks for what you did anyway

Just an additional thought if you decide to crop.. slide the lady on the left a little closer to the other lady just to make a better composition

how do you move move ladies to-gether as that looks cool too, i am such a newbie at this, but willing to learn

[Kraellin]

you're welcome

i'll let OB explain moving the lady over

[Chain]

Originally Posted by vodds

I dont know what you mean when you say 4 x 6 is that pixels or inches also whats 72 ppi dont you mean dpi anyway here is picture

PPI = Pixels per inch
DPI = Dots per inch

It's more correct to say PPI when talking about the resolution of a digital image (notice that the Adobe applications never say "DPI").
Some could argue that a "dot" could be a pixel, but it's best to leave DPI to refer to physical dots like dots of ink on paper (e.g. you might need a 1200 dpi laser printer to reproduce a 300 ppi image). By the way, most monitors are not 72 dpi (mine is something like 96-98 dpi).

--

When he said 4x6 he probably meant inches, although i think measuring images in [size in cm/in]*[ppi] is pointless when measuring things on screen (measured in pixels) unless you want to say at what quality it could be printed... Note that the "ppi" value of an image file has no meaning when displayed on screen (like in you browser). 6x4 inches at 72 ppi (432x288) is quite small, so you could easily make it a bit larger and retain good quality under 100 kb.

(A 600x400 pixel image on screen is still exactly 600x400 pixels (and the same file size) on screen even if the ppi i set to 999999 or 1. The ppi value refers to how high resolution it should be printed at.)

[DXM]

I am impressed by the restoration work... I am however very interested in exactly how she managed to get such shots, normally a newer camera will have some basic setting that tells you when the * is about to hit the fan. A macgyver style solution is to tape a receipt losely over the flash so that it creates an arc... presto. Instant diffuser. Better yet is not to use flash at all.