How do I remove these BG brights?

[Richard Unsworth]

Hi

Can some kind soul give me a quick idea as to how to sort out this BG using tools in CS4

I can bring back the birds exposure nicely but of course that makes things worse in the BG

thanks

Rich

[Roger Clark]

Rich,
Check out this link below. Click on the bird image and a quicktime movie starts that shows creative use of adobe ACR sliders to mitigate problems like this. I personally think the examples are a little extreme, but it gives a nice feel for what can be done.

http://www.creativepro.com/article/create-artificial-hdr-effect-photoshop

Roger

[Doug Brown]

Could you post a second image with the bird properly exposed? I'll give it a try this weekend.

[Richard Unsworth]

Sure Doug will be interesting to see what happens :)

Rich

[Glenn Forbes]

I would crop it first. Then use the shadow and highlight tools to adjust the levels to bring it back in range. You won't be able to adjust the bright areas, as they are pure white. Try replacing the white areas using the cloning tool at varying opacity's.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

My advise is to select the bird on a separate layer and then lighten it a bit, then merge the background layer and the bird layer.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

As a rain forest camper, I have to say that it is very hard to expose this kind of images with such bright highlights on the BG, so it was not easy to try to recover details in the blacks, an advise would be to try to use flash in this situations. Lastly, it is very hard to find this birds at eye level which makes it even harder not to get parts of sky as BG.

here is my attempt with this image, is better to start from the RAW capture of course. Just my two cents.

[Ajay Panjwani]

Am not a pro though, to take part in this thread(for learning)
here is my version edited using PS CS4

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_qHYfYoU4yLg/TEtxsvyGWJI/AAAAAAAAADQ/o5pK_y5zMpI/s640/IMG_9888reexposednew1.jpg

this is done without any selection, if you don't want to lose any detail. Decreased the exposure level as low as possible and
get the visibility of the bird back by increasing brightness and a bit of white level.



took some extra time and tried to process this image further using crop n blur, crop reduces the bright patch in the image and the subject is concentrated.Take a look

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_qHYfYoU4yLg/TEtx0waq3ZI/AAAAAAAAADg/Qlwqv-n3-jA/s512/IMG_9888reexposednewmy.jpg

[David Thomasson]

Hi

Can some kind soul give me a quick idea as to how to sort out this BG using tools in CS4

I can bring back the birds exposure nicely but of course that makes things worse in the BG

thanks

Rich

The key is masking. You need to mask the subject and perch (and any other foreground elements you want to keep in the foreground). The mask will look something like this:

http://a.imageshack.us/img202/8118/maskoj.jpg

The mask allows you to brighten the subject without affecting the background, like this:

http://a.imageshack.us/img693/9638/maskd.gif

Using the same mask (inverted), you can then fix the background. The best way in this case would probably be to replace it with a similar background -- leaves and branches (without the bright spots showing through), shot in the same light conditions.

[Richard Unsworth]

Hi David and Ajay

Will study masking; thanks for the info, much appreciated

Rich

[Doug Brown]

Thanks for the repost. I was hoping for identical crops if possible.

[Doug Brown]

Here's my go at it; not easy to recover!

[Richard Unsworth]

Also Hi to Juan Carlos

That's a really good effort

true, found it difficult if not impossible to find Trogons at eye level, though I did capture Violaceous while walking through Cabo Blanco. I wish I had used the camera flash now as the bird was really close.
I was actually able to walk right under him several times.I hope to return to Costa Rica soon and will put into practice the things I learn here.

gracias
Rich

[Richard Unsworth]

Doug :2eyes2:

I think that looks so much better, really makes such a huge, huge difference; did you use clone tool and blur to get this result, after masking the bird?

Rich

[Doug Brown]

did you use clone tool and blur to get this result, after masking the bird?

That's exactly what I did.

[Richard Unsworth]

Aha

Will need to practice; or get the picture right in thre first place;)

thanks very much for the effort you put in, I'm sure others will learn a lot from this

Rich

[Sandra K. Mathews-Benham]

Wow, this exchange was REALLY helpful. I just learned about masking--and did not realize you could invert!