If you’ll please have a look at this pic of my daughter on Halloween, notice how the flash washed out her face?
Can anybody please work their magic on this photo and/or explain how I can adjust the levels to make a better photo?
Or is there just too much detail lost?
Thanks
Quick Picnik job… didn’t help too much:
http://pics.livejournal.com/troymccluresf/pic/00050cr3
The detail isn’t completely gone - so it ought to be possible to restore it in some fashion - I think it will involve making a duplicate layer of the face, tweaking the contrast to bring out the detail, softening it a bit and changing the colour to natural skin tones, then overlaying it on the original. I don’t have the time to try this at the moment though.
There’s very little detail to work with, unfortunately. I’m not very good at this kind of restoration, but here’s my go at it.
Forgive my red-green colour-blindness.
Cute kid! 
I just downloaded the image and tried a bit of playing around with The Gimp… not a lot of success. The colours in her face have mostly been smashed into white by the brightness.
There is a possibility… if your camera also stored the “raw” image file of the picture, it might be possible to recover some more information.
The raw image file is the data straight from the camera’s sensor, stored before before it gets processed and compressed into a JPEG file. I believe the format differs from camera to camera, or at least sensor to sensor. Photoshop has a plugin that can open many raw files. I can see whether my Photoshop at work has such a plugin (I think it’s optional).
If you have the raw file, PM me with the make and model of your camera. I’ll see whether my Photoshop has the needed plugin, and if yes, I’ll send you info on how to transfer the file to me. Raw files tend to be quite large.
Here’s Adobe on raw file formats.
Sorry, there’s just about zero detail left in the face; if you dump ALL the mid-tones, you can just make out her nostrils, or rather the shadow on her face under her nostrils.
Suggestion for next time:
Take many, many pictures. Everyone’s good/bad picture ratio leans towards bad, taking more pics evens the odds.
Squat down on your haunches and take pictures from her level, not yours. This won’t help the flash problem, but its a better composition technique in general for kid pix.
Here’s my quick try, I just lowered the overall brightness and did a little increase of contrast. Not too good results.
Thank you very much, everybody!
Mangetout, I know your proficiencies, if you can find the time I will be grateful.
Holy moly. I certainly cannot detect your red-green color blindness. This image is better than I had hoped for. Thank you so much!
Care to give any input on how you did that?
Please keep it up, everybody, if you feel the urge to experiment or just have some fun. I promise I cannot be offended.
Also, I have access to a legal copy of Photoshop, so I am willing to learn here too.
As already stated, the flash almost completely blew out her facial details. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to recover them.
First, I thought I’d give an explanation for why this happens. Short answer: Your camera’s dumb. Longer answer: The light-metre in your camera defaults to a matrix metering which means it takes an average light reading from the entire frame. Since your daughter is a relatively small figure framed by a large, dark room in the background, your camera turned up the flash to try to illuminate the entire frame, rather than just your daughter’s face.
There’s a few ways to compensate for this: You could turn on the lights in the background, thus balancing the light in the room, you could change the light metering in your camera to spot or centre-weighted metering (assuming your camera allows this), or you could manually decrease the power of your flash either with the camera controls or by taping a small piece of tissue paper to the flash (which also reduces the chances of red-eye, by the way).
Anyway, I thought I would try my hand at retouching. High-key is sometimes an effective way to deal with over-exposed photos, so I went with that and a bit of faux-vintage mucking around.
I think it’s incredibly beautiful.
Thank you.
ETA: Also, no RAW pics. It puts the pics on a 2 gig SD, and even if it had a buffer… I’ve taken over 100 pics since then. (It’s a business camera and I’m a real estate appraiser).
I actually did much what Mangetout describes. I isolated her face, and increased the contrast using “Levels” and “Saturation” (some people might use “Curves”, or “Channels” to get an even better result, but they’re a mystery to me). I then adjusted the colouration where I thought it needed it, and layered a few versions over the top of itself, mixing and matching the Modes, a method which causes layers to affect each other in different ways, until I got something reasonably close to a skintone shade. I also added in a little hint of highlight and shadow for some depth and dimensionality.
Turned out to be not quite a simple as I first thought - upping the contrast on the facial details brought out a bunch of jpeg artifacts that made her face just look dirty. My monitor here is crap too, so I might have created a monstrosity here.
OK, that’s all the excuses out of the way. Here’s my third attempt:
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/stuff/katiebug3.jpg
I apologise in advance.
Maybe when I get home I can do something.
If you can take another photo of her in the same position, you can copy her nose from the “good” shot onto the original picture. With the proper blending and translucence, you’ll never know it wasn’t the nose in the original shot. I do this all the time and nobody has ever guessed the mouth is from an entirely different photograph of the same person.
Even if you can’t get her in the same position, or maybe you already have other shots of her that you don’t like overall but the nose is okay, you can copy the nose and manipulate its scale, position, etc., to make it have the same proportions as the one in the Halloween shot.
(I’m focusing on the nose because I think the rest of the photo can be retouched using the available PS controls, but the nose is gone and no amount of changing the contrast or brightness can bring it back up–but you could use this trick on any feature or body part. I recently had a photo of me where a nametag was showing through my hair, so I just copied some of my hair from the other side of the picture, flipped it, changed the scale, and pasted it over the nametag. Came out beautifully.)
I sent you one to the email you have in your profile. FLickr seems to suck right now, so that’s the only way I could send it. It still looks a bit washed out (to match the rest of the photo, but I was able to get a bit of detail in there wihtout looking too harsh.
Kinda got it. It’s not great, but I’m at work and can’t tinker much.
If it looks creepy, I can change it. And I have it at its original size.
Gah! Stupid Flickr account. Try this one.
I think I like GuanoLad’s better. What color are wee’un’s eyes IRL? It was hard to tell with the glow from the flash.
I’m glad you liked it. I’ve always been partial to those old hand-tinted photos, and I thought that look would work well with yours (it helps to have such a cute model, too). I could probably do a better job given more time, but that was just a quickie proof-of-concept.
Very good idea. I do a fair amount of retouching, myself, and have occasionally stolen body parts from other photos. It takes a fair amount of finesse, though, and can be pretty tricky for beginners.
Mangetout, “I apologize in advance”? HA! You made the photo 100X better!
I think I’m going to make prints of GuanoLad’s effort. I like the way you warmed it up where the details had been faint. I think my parents are going to put your rendition on a stamp as well.
All the others were great too, better than I could have done.
They are kind of green/brown… hazelish… nobody agrees. I did get the email, and thank you.
I’m going to keep taking pictures and try to learn photoshop better.
Thanks again everybody.
Glad to be of service.
The problem with this method, for a young child, is that from that angle there isn’t much nose to work with anyway. They tend to be very soft and subtle on a toddler, especially a girl, that you can’t see much form to them beyond the shadow they cause beneath. Even side shadows are virtually invisible. So you probably wouldn’t gain much definition.
Really, the photo ought to have been taken closer to the child’s height, closer to her, and then using some natural light coming in from the side, avoiding the need for the flash entirely. Of course, that’s easier said than done once evening rolls in.
