Help needed with P&P

[Ruffy]

Here is a not so good looking picture but I have been using it for a few things and one of them is trying to bring back the sea in the background as well as correct the over exposed shot, anyone else wanna have a go ?

[Donald]

Paul

I think it's too far gone. There's nothing there to recover. You could crank down the exposure on the stones, but the blown water and shirt on the young girl (you daughter?) are going to stay blown.

[jiro]

I have to agree with Donald, Paul. The shot was way too overexposed specially on the girls' dress. If you simply want to make this shot usable, you still can do some extra effort on the PP but there are still limitations as to how far you can make it work. I tried to have a play with it and this is what I came up with:



What I did on the image:

1. I exported the image to Photoshop CS5. Even if it was only a jpeg file, I configured photoshop to allow jpeg files to be opened as RAW files using ACR. In that way, I can use all those wonderful adjustments sliders available in ACR. The only thing that I did adjust with your original image is to set the recovery slider to 100% and that's it.

2. Now, I copied this layer as a new layer and then set its blending mode to multiply. What it does now is to darken all the pixel data so I can still recover some more detail on the blown highlight areas. The already dark areas became too dark so I backed off a little bit by lowering down the opacity of the multiplied layer.

3. When I was happy with the result I looked for some royalty free shoreline images on the web and look for something that would closely resemble the overblown shoreline on the picture. I want to superimpose this new detail so the blown shoreline areas will be covered. I added it to the image file as a new layer (topmost) and then I applied a layer mask so that the new shoreline will only appear at the blown areas at the top of the frame.

4. I copied this layer once again (the new shoreline) and then applied a gaussian blur to it but just a little bit to imitate some lens depth of field effect. I was not happy with the result so I put this layer on the garbage bin and instead copied a new layer and applied a lens blur effect. Now, this was better than the gaussian blur effect. I added a layer mask on this blurred layer so it will only blur the new shoreline data.

That's about it. Hope this helps.

[Ruffy]

Thanks for the ever so helpful advice, I was aware at just how bad it was but it was a question of how/if it could be saved in P&P, with my limitations i knew its something that I could not have done, Jiro, you have done a good job in making a poor picture look acceptable, the task was to try and bring back the sea, I did try having ago at replacing it from another picture but stuggled very much, not sure if that is do able anyhow ??

[jjbacoomba]

Too cool! Very well done Jiro!

[Donald]

Willie - You're some guy with that Photo-shoppie thing.

[ilovelucydog]

Willie... I know I've told you before but... you really should teach some Photoshop/Lightroom workshops.

[Ruffy]

See Jiro, you really are a superhero !!!

ps, you can pay me later for this "big me up" thread lol