Lighting problems...

[pumpkincat210]

I have a photograph a friend wanted me to fix for her. She is at a nightclub with a guy and they are standing in front of a mirror. So it's dark in the nighclub and then when the flash went off it reflected in the mirror making their faces a little hard to see clearly. How would I go about removing some of this light and regaining some face?

[Steve13]

Posting the pic might help

[pumpkincat210]

I'm waiting on her to give me the okay to repost it.

[pumpkincat210]

can it be saved?

[Mandos]

Oh dear,

I don´t think you can "save" very much in this pic. It's not the flash, but the lack of it, that makes the pic so dark. If the flash went off, it wasn´t strong enough to enlighten the persons. Next problem would be the resolution size of the picture and if that wouldn´t be problematic enough, the mirror seemed to have a grainy structure of a kind. Or is these the megapixels? ))

Sorry I can´t help you in this!

Cheers Mandos

[TommyO]

Actually, it looks like they are in front of the glass storefront, with light coming in from outside. Either way, it will be very difficult. If you have a higher resolution image to work from, that may help. It appears to be a cell phone image, which makes it hard due to the low resolution and it's out of focus. Hence, there is very little detail to recover in the faces.

You could use several methods to increase the contrast in the faces, especially along the edges of features. This generally gives the appearance of more detail. But, it is also only effective on higher res images, where you have more pixels to play with. So, it could yield nothing on this one.

[pumpkincat210]

Yeah, I was pretty sure it was a lost cause because zooming in on it only pixelates it badly. I'm not sure if it was a cell phone image or an actual photo copy that was scanned in on a bad scanner.

[Kraellin]

it can be helped, but a full restore would take a very good artist rebuilding quite a bit of the image. as the others have pointed out, the resolution is low, it's blurry and it's low light, plus the blown out white areas... very rough combination.

i worked on this a little bit, mostly the woman's face. you can sort of see her eyes... sort of and perhaps well enough to rebuild them. the lips are in bad shape and the nose is rough also, but again, some help can be done.

the trouble with these is, you could almost do better painting the whole thing from scratch and you're going to put in a lot of hours for very little good results. you'd be better of going back to the bar/club or whatever it was and shooting it all over

but, with a lot of careful work, you could make this better... somewhat... if you're good... if you're patient... if your threshold for frustration is pretty high... if.... well, you get the picture

[0lBaldy]

Yeppers Higher res needed

[Kraellin]

better than i got, OB

[pumpkincat210]

so basically i need some plugins and very good artistic skills to help this poor photo?

[Southbay]

Basic curves, noise suppression, shadows/highlights, hue/sat, high pass overlay, some localized USM. Not sure what more I'd do to work on this one.

(edit) Forgot...ran it through Lighroom first, and applied strong recovery and a touch of fill.

I'll agree that maybe with paint brush in hand, there is some possibility. But it's A LOT of work from here on out.

[Kraellin]

that's pretty damn good, southbay!

[Southbay]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

that's pretty damn good, southbay!

Sucks, thanks. Sometimes when you throw everything at it, some things stick.

[Kraellin]

sucks, thanks?? was that supposed to be 'shucks'?

[Southbay]

Originally Posted by Kraellin

sucks, thanks?? was that supposed to be 'shucks'?

HA! That's hilarious. Typing while listening to tunes. Yes, shucks!

[Kraellin]

hehe, ok