Rescuing high key but underexposed subject?

One of my most common dilemmas photographing BIF is caused by our constant dreary cloudy skies. I occasionally take images when exposure compensation was not set enough, resulting in a whitish sky and still somewhat underexposed bird. During Raw conversion, one can boost the compensation within reason. But usually not enough and only makes the sky that much whiter.

My most common approach in PS is to to try selecting the bird only, and applying levels and curves or shadows/highlights to it. Don't want to do this on the entire image as it takes an already whitish sky and makes it too hot. I would use the magic wand to select the sky, then selection inverse to then grab the bird only.

There are two resulting issues with this approach:

1) The magic wand approach usually creates heavy artifacts along the borders of the bird, where selective curves or S/H was applied.

2) Increasing the curves or shadows on the bird dramatically increases noise, often in the wings.

What technique might be better?

I have been using Niksoftware's Color Efex's Pro filters to do the sky. With its U-Point technology to deselect the subject it has proven to be very good.

Jeff,

There is no good answer here. Flash is usualy not an option due to the ss required for a BIF and the limitations of HSS flash. My approach is to expose for the bird and not worry about the bg. If the sky bg gets blown, then so be it. This is one reason that I often focus my efforts for bif on comps with non-sky bgs. If you want to photograh bif against varied bgs, you should use manual exposure mode.

For those in the digital art world, they are not oppsed to replacing blown out white sky with a blue one. I am not comfy with such an approach.

Jeff,

Duplicate the background layer (Ctrl J), and use Select>Color Range to select the white sky, (use Ctrl Shft I to invert the selection for the bird) click add a layer mask, and then Ctrl click the mask thumbnail to get the selection again, then use Refine Edges in CS3 to alter the selection in real time to best suit your needs. Make sure you click the layer thumbnail to alter the image and the mask thumnail to alter the mask. Ctrl clicking the thumbnails places the layer contents into active selection.

As for making the bird lighter try choosing SCREEN as the layer blending mode. Duplicate the layer as necesary and use layer opacity for final tweak.

Best,

Chas