theme: church organ

Organ and ceiling of St. Paul's Episcopal in Seattle. Used Topaz watercolor. Not sure what to do re blown whites. any suggestions?

Hi Hazel. I don't know how easy it is to go back to the Church but if you could maybe take the same shot on an overcast day when the light is not so intense.You could have taken bracketed shots from a tripod and then merged the shots together. That is exposing for shadows and highlights separately. Some highlights can be rescued to a certain extent using various software but if it is too far gone you will have trouble in that.A camera with a high dynamic range might help as would shooting in raw but you might still have some limitations with this shot.Shooting in black and white film,Ilford xp2, might help as it has an incredible range giving detail in highlights and shadows.regards Geoff Thompson. Adelaide, South Australia

I very much like the colors and the shapes. After trying a couple things, I was only able to come up with two possible remedies for the blown highlights. Although I shoot mostly HDRs, there are times when I haven't (older shots, particularly, before I even knew what HDR meant) or when I didn't bracket the shots enough. I've been able to use Adobe Camera Raw to save a number of different versions with the Exposure slider set in increments of 1, as needed. Mostly -- but not always -- I've done that on Raw files, but not always. I'll be posting an image soon that started as a single iPhone shot saved as a tif. I used that procedure to get three additional exposures and processed all four as though they'd been bracketed with multiple exposures in-camera.

If that doesn't work for you because of one thing or another, there's a different way to go, but it'd be a lot of work. The short version is that all the blown highlights would be replaced with something else. In the cases where the incoming light brightened things such as the beams and ceiling too much, a lot of tedious patching / healing to make them look like the adjacent unaffected spaces could probably be done. The skylights, themselves, would need a different approach. I'd fill them with a blue like that of the plates near the center of the image that hold the beams together. It wouldn't be an accurate portrayal, of course, but I think it'd work.

Thanks, Geoff. I'll try to keep your suggestions in mind for another time. Seattle is 2000 miles away. We were there to visit our son, but we will be going back and so I'll work on it. Hadn't thought of bracketing. Good idea.

I may just try that, Dennis. Would be a fun experiment in post production. If it comes out ok, I'll post. Thanks.

Depending on how out of the box you want your image to be, here's something else that I found when some stars aligned. (My computer has been having a strange malady. When it happened last night, I had your image open in Photoshop to try a few things with the highlights. I couldn't shut down the normal way, so I held the power button until it turned off. Earlier in the evening, I'd downloaded a trial of the latest Fractalius update. When I fired up Photoshop, today after installing the demo, there was the recovered copy of your image, so I tried the new Fractalius on it.) If you're a PC rather than a Mac person, you might want to give the demo on your image and see what you think. I've been only using my own Fractalius presets, but there are some interesting possibilities in the new version.

Hazel,

Greetings. You might use this image as an exercise in image repair ;-)... To a certain extent this is what Photoshop was made for. I did a couple of spots for grins (didn't finish the bottom part, but you can see where I'm headed):

Attachment 150475

Some ideas:

The idea is to find a bit that looks like what you want to fill and either clone (for smaller bits) or with a new layer shift or flip manually aligning with a low opacity, masking and painting the mask, adjust opacity to color match, etc.

When you have something just right, flatten, (rinse and repeat). Painstaking work for large areas as is here, though. In any event a good package of skills to have in your bag of tricks.

Cheers,

-Michael-

Painstaking, I agree, but well worth the effort on the right project. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!

This is a great view/angle of such an interesting interior that I think it is worth working on. I like the direction Michael is taking it.

Thanks, Nancy. I will work on it and get it posted in the near future. Thanks to all for suggestions!

How far did you go in the raw converter for highlight recovery?

Once the bright whites are cemented into the image when it goes to PS, there is a limited quality of tonal recovery possible. But in the raw converter it's another story. There are limits, but I'd go back to the raw file (assuming you're using ACR?) and pull the highlights slider all the way left and then the exposure down and see if you can get more out of the whites without going to gray. Then pull the Shadows slider right and see how the darker areas look. Somewhere in there will be your best balance. (Watch the histogram and tweak Blacks and Whites as needed.)

Or do two conversions as Dennis says and blend in PS, but getting a good blend will be tricky and may involve the Blend If sliders.