I need help correcting a photo with respect to too much flash causing the colors, especially in my face and in the background, to be washed out. I have had two professional photographers, one that did my engagement pics and one that did my wedding pics, attempt to correct it with little to no result. I've tried darkening it myself which makes the intense outdoor lighting in the background look better but the trade off is then that my skin tone and that of the other person take on an orange appearance. I also sent it to one of the photographers in a TIFF format instead of the jpeg. Are there any techies out there that specialize in photo correction or do you all know of a professional lab that can help me? Many thanks!

7/20/2013 1:57:53 PM

Post the picture, or give us a link to the full-size image.

7/20/2013 8:36:41 PM

Making a tiff from a jpg is worthless. If a jpg is blown out it is blown out, anything you do is just faking things. Raw formats give you the ability to adjust the exposure, saturation, white balance, etc after the fact and not lose quality the way you would from a jpg or even a straight out of camera tiff.

Post the picture and I'll see what I can do.

7/20/2013 9:23:11 PM

if the jpeg or tiff is decent resolution you can fix it just fine, RAW is better but not necessary. post the image and I'll see what I can do in Lightoom and Capture One.

7/20/2013 10:59:58 PM

Here it is guys in the original jpeg format. Any crack at making this bad boy look as close to what it would have naturally would greatly be appreciated. Long story short, I met my favorite sports star and spent thousands of dollars in making the trip happen for a once in a lifetime shot at a photo. I got it, but a group of people I met out prior to meeting him changed the settings on the camera and I didn't set them back. Couple that with the fact that these guys don't really like the added attention and I'm not exactly fluent in German so I couldn't exactly ask for a redo. Plus I was still on a high and thinking everything was outstanding, then I walked away and began to notice this less than perfect picture. As you can all see the picture is very whited out due to the light/flash. What bothers me the most are my face, the lighting around it, the lamps, and the intense lighting in that outdoor courtyard. Many thanks to those willing to take a crack at it!

7/21/2013 11:26:03 PM

Or not...
I have no idea how to post a pic in here. It is under my photo gallery

7/21/2013 11:27:13 PM

7/21/2013 11:33:45 PM

i think this site changes the image quality, you need to host it somewhere

7/22/2013 12:50:05 AM

Would it help if I gave you a link to it on facebook?

7/22/2013 1:10:51 AM

facebook also downgrades the resolution of photos...if you have a copy of the native format of the digital image saved anywhere locally, you could try uploading it to a site like imgur and specifying the upload not decrease the resolution at all...i'm currently in the process of trying to make an edit

7/22/2013 1:20:33 AM

I created an account with imgur.
Here it is: http://abkirkle.imgur.com/

Thank you!

7/22/2013 1:32:12 AM

sorry, its the best i could do

7/22/2013 1:35:05 AM

this one adds a different lighting in the background, so it might work as well



this last one adds to the color, so it also might work

http://i.imgur.com/TOQHWda.jpg

[Edited on July 22, 2013 at 2:31 AM. Reason : hope i could help! ]

7/22/2013 2:16:51 AM

How good of a quality do you need and how much are you paying? Is this for Facebook or something you want to print and frame? I can't do quite as good as Tree Twista but I can either try to correct the pixels you have or recreate it with entirely new pixels in higher resolution by basically creating a photo illustration.

Here is a start, the earlier

7/22/2013 3:35:21 AM

Lol!, you guys are terrible..

7/22/2013 8:26:43 AM

They're just trying to help. We're not all computer wizzes dude

7/22/2013 9:46:36 AM

What you guys are doing would be a lot funnier had it not been done already and documented on the Internet. Like say on page 106 of the best thing you gave seen on the Internet today thread.

7/22/2013 9:59:24 AM

^haha that's awesome. Reminds me the missing cat poster troll from the Internetz

7/22/2013 10:23:06 AM

^^ it's new to someone, somewhere

7/22/2013 10:55:10 AM

^^^So let me get this straight.

If something has been done once, somewhere on the internet, it no longer is funny elsewhere on the internet. You're pretty much saying all meme's are lame because they're just copying someone else's idea.

You realize how stupid that is right?

7/22/2013 10:58:34 AM

can we get the back story now about who that dude is and why he was worth spending thousands of dollars for a photo with? (a photo in an incredibly busy room that the good samaritan photographer cropped your legs out of)

7/22/2013 11:02:43 AM

poor guy just wanted some help

7/22/2013 11:05:46 AM

This would be easy with a RAW file.

7/23/2013 2:40:59 PM

Quote :

"What you guys are doing would be a lot funnier had it not been done already and documented on the Internet. Like say on page 106 of the best thing you gave seen on the Internet today thread."

Would you like a step ladder so you can get off of that high horse that some how crawled up your ass?

The second I saw the pic and this thread, I pretty much knew this was going to be 4chaned.

Quote :

"I have had two professional photographers, one that did my engagement pics and one that did my wedding pics, attempt to correct it with little to no result."

1. This is a fairly easy picture to fix for a professional.
2. Who ever you sent the quick snap picture off to "fix" aren't professional photogs, either that or they just lied to you and didn't even bothered to try. 99% probably the latter.


The flare and blooming issues present in the picture that you claim is "washed out" due to the flash is not entirely accurate. The photograph in question is actually over exposed and has a persistent amount of flare and blooming effects due to the very bright background that your "flash" was competing with. Flare and Bloom are what reduced the contrast and detail in you and your subjects face. The flare, coupled with the black t-shirt in the scene, could have played havoc with the on board in camera metering, specially if the settings were set on spot center or averaged center (or anything that just ignored average scene metering). In camera metering tends to set on producing 18% gray on whites when on auto mode; this would make blacks in that scene whiter than they are in real life, thus metering in a complex lighting scenario such as yours would mean over exposure.

As for less vibrate colors, that's simply color temps weren't set right at the time of exposure. It's a very "cool" color temped photo, almost selenium toned. Again, this could have been an issue if you set the white balance to auto in a scene that has a lot of different lights in the scene that would make it go bonkers. 5500k of the flash, coupled with whatever type of light temps of the room (incandescent, florescent, etc...), and then the intense natural light coming from outside (both sunlight and reflected bounce light of shade (bounce light as in diffused light from the sky, which gives a much cooler tone in the 6500-7500k temp range)).

You can always add a bit of color vibrancy back into the subjects and scene, but the real issue is how the photo lost a lot of detail in the highlights plus little to no shadow and midtones in order for the color tones to actually be affected. It's a simple fix for something like me to do, but it would take a few layers to get everything fixed, plus I would just mask you and the subject out and add depth of field to separate the foreground and background.

It's just a very boring photo that was shot very bad in the most eye stabbingly terrible location (seriously, who would consider that high class sitting area with ugly blue pattern fabric chairs that doesn't match the couch with green floral carpets?)

7/23/2013 3:03:56 PM

^ that is impressive . What do you do for a living?

7/23/2013 3:58:41 PM

Add some instagram-style fake tilt shift effect to soften the background, I'm not usually a fan of it but it might be applicable. I'm happy to pay with it in Lightroom, I just haven't had the chance yet. I should be able to fix what they need and soften the background, but the cropped legs and business will still be there

7/23/2013 4:32:44 PM

^^ I studied Fashion Brand Management and Applied Science in Commercial Photography. As far as for living... I cook food, move my feet and barter; with the occasional photo shoot or wedding here and there when I need cash.

Currently in between careers and jobs, but I'm teaching myself material science, architecture and product design as a hobby. Also dabble in IT related fields as a contractor of sorts.

7/23/2013 6:34:52 PM