I rescued the shot I thought would not be any good.
During the shoot several frames were so dark that I thought Id never be able to use them.
I was shooting in the studio and as usual Im shooting faster than my main strobe could resycle, there were lots of frames that were almost black but for a small amount of exposure that had come from the speed light I was using to fire the strobe, it was directed to the strobe generator on the floor by my feet so very little of the light from the speed light would hit my model. I use this method to sync a lot. I hate cables and never realy liked using radio or infra red triggers because they always fail on me.
Heres what I did;
Shooting raw first of all because your guaranteed more latitude in your ability to edit in photoshop.
Open image in photoshop.
Select image adjust, curves,
Move the middle of the curve up untill theres a reasonable image on screen, at this point the image was still a bit too dark but parts of the shot were obviously going to burn out if I had lifted the curve more, so, select image adjust, selective colour, select white, move the slider along to the right to increase any density in the whites/high lights, then select image adjust curves again and move the curve up untill your happy with the overall density of the shot. There was some other local photoshop editing but this is only to clean up and sharpen etc.
Is the fine detail very grainy? If not, how did you manage to avoid it? I have dragged a couple of pics back from the brink, but I would hesitate before using them commercially because of grain, and sometimes banding issues. This is especially the case in areas of red, and pronounced where the white balance needs to be tweaked.
Is the fine detail very grainy? If not, how did you manage to avoid it? I have dragged a couple of pics back from the brink, but I would hesitate before using them commercially because of grain, and sometimes banding issues. This is especially the case in areas of red, and pronounced where the white balance needs to be tweaked.
My thoughts exactly, especially re: red areas. How DO you handle this? That image looks relatively noiseless.
Is the fine detail very grainy? If not, how did you manage to avoid it? I have dragged a couple of pics back from the brink, but I would hesitate before using them commercially because of grain, and sometimes banding issues. This is especially the case in areas of red, and pronounced where the white balance needs to be tweaked.
I shot this on a leaf back so lots of data to play with. So no grain even blown right up. I did use a little desat and selective colour reduced red but not a great amount.
Oh that's what I have to do with most of my own shots.
;)
Good job on recovering that to look like nothing was wrong to begin with!
As someone that kinda' lives in that world, fixing pics that is, not around good looking models,
I can appreciate the post-processing you did.
Couldn't pass up a personal challenge:
--to--> --to--> - 42.6k original ----- PS Auto-level only ------- my dabble ---
(most of the time was spent fighting the blotchyness of the compression - wasn't much left on the bone you left here) ;)
