Picture salvageable

[soonerhunt]

Hi long time lurker 1st time poster. I love the pose but is the picture salvageable for a portrait or is the white too much, especially around the nose

[MedRep]

Hello mate.. is this ok for a quick edit? I think it needs maybe a bit more work on the highlights.. the picture is totally blown out..
hope you like it. You could try cropping it close to the person and excluding the trees at the back. It might work out better..

[ohenry]

You cannot regain data that isn't there. Blown highlights will never be able to be recovered. If it were just the background that was overexposed, you could replace it, but the highlights in your subjects hat are blown, as are her cheeks. Looking at the attempt to salvage it, you can see the obvious flaws remaining.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't replace good exposures. I'd call for a reshoot rather than a salvage mission.

[FAPhoto]

Agreed with ohenry, I rather shoot it again and not try to fix it in photoshop.

[soonerhunt]

I didn't have much faith in fixing it just hoping that maybe someone knew some trick that I didn't know about. The cheeks could probably be fixed but the nose has no depth it's so blow out. Was fighting exposure with all the snow and had her laughing good. I took some quickies trying to capture that genuine smile and had the exposure set to high. Thanks for trying to fix it and answering my question

[R. House]

Sometimes with images that have problems I have to resort to an "artsy" look to try and hide as many flaws as posible. As far as blown highlight areas, sometimes using the patch tool will help. I used that technique on her nose. Anyway, this is where I went with this image. Ray

[soonerhunt]

That is really cool R House. I had wondered about a B/W, if I could solve it by making the picture B\W with selective green color on the branches. I have some other images that are not blown like this one from the same area. I just liked the laugh. It's my daughter so I can always shoot again.

[xxloverxx]

I agree with R House's version, but to improve even more on that, I'd clone (with white) those bits on the edges that aren't white. Hard to explain.

[felix.reichardt]

Originally Posted by soonerhunt

Hi long time lurker 1st time poster. I love the pose but is the picture salvageable for a portrait or is the white too much, especially around the nose

Honest opinion: No, you cannot rescue it so that it will look really good. Yes, you can do some trickery as shown but it won't look decent.

[tomrit]

As everyone says, nothing is going to recover texture in the snow. However, simply raising the contrast a bit, and lowering the brightness, makes into a pretty decent snapshot.

I do not feel like going to the trouble of uploading it, but I simply raised the contrast by 20 and reduced the brightness by 30 in photoshop, Often, minor corrections work best.

BTW, I really like that B&W version. It is beyond my photoshop skills however.