Digital Photography - Fixing Photos 1 - Page 15


The following is a technique that can recover overexposed images using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements. The key to this working is that there must be some data in the colored area of the image. I used this technique to salvage part of an image and then combined to make it a totally new image.

Original Image - Queen Triggerfish taken by Robin Reed in the Bahamas
All images on this page are © 2004 Robin Reed

Using Layers and Multiply to Increase the Color
Open the image in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements. Please note that the location of some of these commands may differ between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. All examples shown  here were made with Adobe Photoshop CS.

In the Layer menu, choose duplicate layer.


You can leave the default of background copy and click OK.
In the layers drop down box, choose multiply.

You can continue to duplicate layers until your subject is dark enough. If you duplicate a layer and the picture is darker than you want it to be but the previous layer is a little too light, you can use the opacity slider (located to the right of the Multiply box) and find a setting between the two layers.

Now that the queen triggerfish has good color, I still have a background that it bad and the fish is not located well in the frame. To fix this, I used the extract tool to cut out the fish and put it on a black background. An alternative would be to use the lasso tool rather than the extraction tool. I did not detail the extraction process as this may be too complicated for the average computer user.


I then took a wide angle shot that Robin took and used it for a background. I used the magic wand tool to select the black background and copied the queen triggerfish. I then pasted it over Robin's wide angle image and moved it so that the front lip of the fish was centered in the photo.


Finally, I pasted another copy of the fish into the above image and flipped it horizontally and aligned the two fish so that they met in the middle. The final image is below:


The finished image is so much more than what we started with. If this lesson teaches you anything, it is the importance of a program like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements. I am by no means an expert at Photoshop but it is an essential part of my digital photographic tool package. Note: I used the multiply function to make the photo darker. You can use the same process but use the "Screen" selection in the drop down box to make the photo lighter.

   
Next - Eliminating Backscatter with Photoshop