Technique Tuesday: Feeling A Bit Gray Today? – Making Underexposed Look Good

Good Afternoon Everybody,

Today is a brand new day for me.  LaDawn returned from her travels from the Nashville Fitness Spa late over the weekend and is in the process of “shaming me” into getting into better shape. She lost 8 pounds and about 10 1/2 inches during her week’s stay. Me, I probably put on a few inches and pounds while she was gone:~)

Anyway, the Ziser’s are on a new health kick.  Less calories, less fats, better carbs, exercise (ugh), and WHAT! – no adult beverages for a while. Ohhh… I hope I’s still alive for Photoshop World in two weeks ;~)

OK, enough of my moaning ad groaning – let’s get on with today’s Technique Tuesday.

Feeling A Bit Gray Today? – Making Underexposed Look Good

After my post a few weeks ago entitled, “Whoops, I Should Have Caught That” [link], I showed an image in which the shadow of one wedding party member fell directly on another and really underexposed the shadowed person.  A question was raised in comments about how to fix underexposed skin tones.

Now the fancy of the matter is that we have covered underexposed images previously five times and many of those images involved saving the skin tones in one way or another.  Just look at the screen grabs for those tutorials below – obviously many of the images were a near death experience.  The tutorials show how I saved them.  When I say “saved them", I talking about a salvage job that makes them at least a saleable image.

The first was entitled, Burn and Dodge Cha-Cha” way back in the early days of Digital ProTalk. Before I get into today’s tutorial, I’ll list the others right here with and intros and their links – you can click on the image too.  Enjoy these instant replays AND don’t miss today’s post following these links:

1. Burn and Dodge Cha-Cha: [link]

This Photoshop Tutorial shows 3 ways to Burn and Dodge in Photoshop. Each method is discussed as to it's best application in your work flow. There are three BONUS tips along the way too.

2. Under Exposure - Part 1: [link]

But what do we do if that image is badly underexposed and it really needs to be in the wedding album? Can we save it? What are the noise issues involved? If there is a tremendous amount of noise, what can we do to ameliorate it?

3. Saving The (Underexposed) Image – Part 2: [link]

Different exposure problems call for different strategies in solving the problem. I have the same image saved in JPEG and RAW format. Each file demands a different strategy to obtaining the best result.

4. Resurrecting an Image From The Dead: [link]

Today we have my last tutorial on underexposure - it's a practically invisible image that we will resurrect from the dead pulling out all the stops - or rather adding a bunch more stops to the exposure.

5. Can This Photograph Be Saved? [link]

The fact that this image was on “life support” didn’t deter me from the fact that I wanted to see if I could save it because of that special moment between these two ladies. Remember,  I wasn’t trying for a “perfect” result.  The goal was to obtain a “saleable” result.

And now for today’s post:

Feeling A Bit Gray Today? – Making Underexposed  Look Good

In this tutorial I’m going to show you yet another strategy to save the skin tones of an image.  Let’s revisit the image I references in my post .

We can use any number of ways to save this image – in fact, many of the ways in the previous listing of tutorials could have worked effectively.  Today I’m showing you one more solution – it’s one of my favorite Photoshop plug-ins – drum roll, please  - I-Correct Portrait.

This has been one of our “go-to” color balance/skin tone one-click plug-in for many years.  That’s right, one-click – that’s why I like it so much, it’s just flat out easy to use.  In this tutorial I’ll show you how it can be applied to the image you see right here. A little lightening and brightening, adjust the contrast, touch up the skin tones, and you are good to go.  Just hit the PLAY button and Enjoy!

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Hey gang, that’s it for me today.  I think it’s taken longer to find all the past links than to create today’s video.  Anyway, now you have them all in one place – better bookmaker this page for further reference ;~)

Time for me to get back to my real job…

See ya’ tomorrow for another episode of “You Got To Come Back With The Shot!”.

Later,  David