Shadow on half of the body

[eclectic1]

Hello, this is my first time posting to this site. I have a friend who took a photograph of someone but half of the person body is dark and the other is light. When I tried to fix the face it started looking distorted. Can anyone tell me how I can even out the color so it looks natural or is it impossible to do?

[MBChamberlain]

Generally speaking there isn't much you can do with really sharp contrasts like this. You should usually have a fill light on the other side set 1-2 stops below the main light source to fill in the shadow.

What you can do for this one is play with the curves and levels...

I left the white and black points the same and added points at I 42-->O 62 and I 164--> O 160.

Then ran levels at 0, 1.14, 255.

Grab the burn tool and touch the shadow areas on the red channel to reduce the red cast inherant in heavy curves work.

I also sharpened it a little and used Selective Color to richen the color.

Michael

[Gary Richardson]

Hi, have to agree with Mike, in the case of such a contrast, it is not possible to totally even out the light. However shadow can be decreased a little by trying the following.

Duplicate Background.
Perform extraction of girl.
Click on girl layer. Cntrl+Alt+Shift+~ to select highlights, Select Inverse, to select shadows.
Now adjust using Levels or Curves (or both).
Create new layer set to Soft Light blend, fill with 50% grey, paint in lighness or shadow using soft white/black brush set to 5%.

[philbach]

Well I used Shadow/Highlight in photoshop CS. It helped. I've enclosed the photo with the settings that I used to get the result

[Flora]

Hi everybody,

really great jobs!!!!

eclectic1,

Welcome to RP!

I agree with the others about not being easy or advisable to completely eliminate the shadows in a picture with such a strong contrast It would look very unnatural ....

Originally Posted by eclectic1

Can anyone tell me how I can even out the color so it looks natural or is it impossible to do?

To even out colour I usually use Selective Colors but, if you work with Photoshop, you could try:

*Curves,
*Levels,
*Hue&Saturation,
*Color Balance,
*Replace Colour,
*Channel Mixer,
*.... blank Layers (blending set to Color),
*or tweaking the Channels ....

(and I probably forgot a couple of other ways ....)

[dlindo]

First off...Great pic, I don't know why you would want to flatten the image by taking away the contrast. Perhaps you just want certain details to como out? I don't know. I think a quick and easy way ( cuz of the # of steps ) is to:

1- Copy that layer
2- Change the blending options to "Screen"
3- Lower the Opacity level till you are satisfied
4- Erase the parts you DON'T Want to change on the copied layer so that the untouched layer shows up. This way you are letting the program do the work and the picture looks less retouched.

There are about 26387628736287 other ways and neither one of em is less convenient or effective than the next but, this is just one more to that bunch

Good Luck!