sunlight issue...

[Mr Cat]

hi chaps - quick one here...

was at a wedding yesterday - while the weather was wonderful it made for some crap photos (midday) - a lot of potentially decent ones have issues with dark shadows one one half of some faces...

what's the best way to deal with them..? as I'd ideally like to brighten the darkened sides!

 

[matthewr]

1. Fill-in flash.

2. Or have your assistant wield a suitable reflector disc.

Not much you can do once the picture is taken.

 

[Mr Cat]

cheers...thought so...

but looking at the pics (uploading them now) - there's only a handful that have major issues...

 

[guybat]

And without being a smartarse, colour negative film is amazing at getting a) the bride's dress and b) the groom's suit simultaneously in harsh daylight.

 

[cliffpatte]

Mr Cat

do you have the original RAW files? If you do, you should find you have 12 or 14 bits of dynamic range to play with.

Do you have access to photoshop CS3 or CS4? If you open the files in Adobe Camera RAW you can recover detail from the shadows pretty easily using the tone curve by boosting the darks.

If you only have jpegs, you'll need to isolate the areas you want to recover details from and boost them up using levels or selective curves. Lowering the contrast and boosting brightness might also work.

BTW In the Nikon world (yes I know you use Canon) active D-lighting can be used to recover detail assuming the normal profile was selected when shooting.

Cliff

PS Guy does have a point about the latutude with film ;-)

 

[Mr Cat]

Hi cliff - yeah, I shoot in RAW and I've got a copy of cs3 somewhere...elements too...I'll have a look tomorrow...

cheers