Saving an Underexposed JPEG in Photoshop (Elements or CS) - Page 20
At the end of May and the beginning of June, I dove with my friend Robin Reed in the northwestern Bahamas aboard the Nekton Pilot. Robin is an aspiring underwater photographer. She shoots with a Canon Digital Rebel digital SLR in an Ikelite housing with an Ikelite 200 strobe. After every dive, we would sit in the salon aboard the Pilot and go through her files. There are times when the exposure on a shot is really off and when shooting slides, the slide would be tossed in the trash can. That is tough when the subject is special. While diving the Sugar Wreck north of Grand Bahama Island, Robin photographed a green turtle. She had been shooting with a Sigma 28-80mm zoom lens and was shooting small things. She forgot to change her lens opening for the wider shot of the turtle and underexposed the shot terribly. Boy, was she disappointed. The image below is the original jpeg (resized for use on the web but with no changes to exposure).  You may be not able to make out the turtle in the image but trust me, it is there. To see if it could be salvaged, I turned to Adobe Photoshop CS. The same techiques that I used are available in Photoshop Elements. I will take you through the steps that I used to fix this image. To lighten the image, I created a new background layer. In Photoshop, I used "Layer", "Duplicate Layer". I accepted the default name of "Background copy". In the drop down box under the Layers tab, I chose the blend option "Screen". I find that this method works better than using the Levels or Curves function for an image that is this bad to start with. If the image was too light, I would use the same procedure but use the blend option "Multiply" choice under the Layers tab. |
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| I have zoomed in on the turtle to show you what happened when I applied "Screen" to the original image. It got lighter but it is still much too dark. With the backgroup copy layer selected, I duplicated the backgroud copy layer by choosing "Layer", "Duplicate Layer". I accepted the default name of "Background copy 2". By selecting the background copy layer and duplicating it, I am applying the blend effect to the new layer. The result is below left. The result was a still too dark image. I duplicated the "background copy 2" layer again and the result is on the right. |
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| Still too dark. I duplicated it twice more and I was in the ballpark.
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| Now that I could see the image okay, I cropped it to an 8 x 10 size at 300 dpi and cleaned up the background using the clone tool and the healing brush. I adjusted the levels slightly and below is the final result. This is sure a long ways from our original. The purpose of this section is to show you the kind of changes that you can make to images that you would have discarded when shooting film. | |
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| Another lesson in this section is the importance of learning an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop CS or Adobe Photoshop Elements. An image editing program is not a fix-all to correct exposures and it certainly is not an excuse not to get the correct exposure in the first place. With digital SLR histograms, it is possible to see if your exposure is correct and then make corrections but you have to take the time to use it. I understand that when you are excited, you don't always remember to look at the histogram to see if your exposure is correct. When you are confonted with one of those times, remember that you may be able to salvage that bad exposure in an image editing program. | |
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