Can my photo be fixed?!

Stupid_Private

Right, I was out taking photos at the half marathon yesterday and while making my way to the 12 mile mark I hit the poxy camera and switched it from Av to M. What resulted was a few awful bloody pictures. Typically they were of the leaders and I know a few of the lads so I wanted to be pass them on. Is there any editing I can do in Gimp or ImageReady to fix them. There's about 4 I'd like to fix up.



Messing with the brightness and hue/saturation I managed to do this -


I think some of the other ones are a lot whiter than this one as well!

Thanks

5uspect

Did you shoot RAW?
If so you can do a lot to recover the blown out highlights.

EDIT: A simple curves adjustment in PS did this:


You need to be able to understand the image histogram.
Only his vest and the white line on the road were blown out (right image).
If you have shot RAW then you should be able to fix them to an acceptable level.

Stupid_Private

Thanks for that.

Unfortunately I don't shoot in RAW. I'm fairly new to even using a DSLR. I don't really do any processing afterwards so I didn't really see the point. Then I go and do something stupid like this!

CabanSail

I think we will have a new convert to shooting RAW

5uspect

Always, always always shoot RAW. Unless you need the shooting speed.

If your shots are not any more blown out than the example you posted you can recover them.
A levels or curves adjustment is all you should need.

Stupid_Private

Is it cheeky to put up the four pictures I like and see if someone *cough* 5uspect *cough* has a chance to work their magic?! I'm completely lost in this gimp program trying to fix them - Nothing seems to be making any difference except for the good old saturation tool.

My picture of the winner turned out awful but I got a few shots of him earlier in the race that I quite liked. If it is a very cheeky request then don't worry about it. These are in no way urgent - the lads who came second and third were both friends of mine and typically what would have been my best shots of them turned out like this!

And yes, I shall be shooting in RAW from now on.

wackerdattacker

stupid private here is a quick attempt using thumb size ( my f##k up )
ILL give the full size a go tonight and repost tomorrow sometime
p:s 9/10 times you wont get the blown highlights back fully ( around shoulders )

Paddy

5uspect

Stupid_Private wrote: »

Is it cheeky to put up the four pictures I like and see if someone *cough* 5uspect *cough* has a chance to work their magic?! I'm completely lost in this gimp program trying to fix them - Nothing seems to be making any difference except for the good old saturation tool.

My picture of the winner turned out awful but I got a few shots of him earlier in the race that I quite liked. If it is a very cheeky request then don't worry about it. These are in no way urgent - the lads who came second and third were both friends of mine and typically what would have been my best shots of them turned out like this!

And yes, I shall be shooting in RAW from now on.

First of all have a read of this:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/5179/
This explains how curves works in the GIMP.

Second here is my quick fix. They're a but over saturated but it's a start.

Stupid_Private

Nice. I'll read that this evening and have a play around with them.

Thanks for the retouches and help.

sheesh

not great but its a start,
copied the image onto a second layer
put a high pass filter unto that and used the hard light blending option then darkened the image below.

then played around with saturation and colour balance

I had to make this smaller to get it to upload

Stupid_Private

wackerdattacker wrote: »

stupid private here is a quick attempt using thumb size ( my f##k up )
ILL give the full size a go tonight and repost tomorrow sometime
p:s 9/10 times you wont get the blown highlights back fully ( around shoulders )

Paddy

Thanks for that Paddy. I didn't spot this yesterday - I can't get over how much you managed to actually get back.

5uspect

If you look at the thresholded image I posted in post #2 all that is blown out is the white bits. The rest of the information is still there. The numbers are just too high. If you look at the histograms of the images posted you'll see what's called posterization.

If you had shot RAW you would get a 12 bit image (12 bit is 2^12 or 4096 different shades of gray). That means you have a lot more dynamic range to play with than with 8 bit JPEG. (2^8 is 256 so you only have a 1/16 the amount of data)

So if you had shot RAW you would be able to pretty much recover all those images without too much fuss or weird effects like those mentioned above.

Did I mention about shooting RAW?

wackerdattacker

Ok as promised my attempt to better your shots......






I have seen and done better ( sorry )

Paddy

Stupid_Private

I should really subscribe to threads rather than stumbling back in a few days later...

Cheers for that Paddy. I think that first photo would probably have been my best of the day - shame I had to ruin it. As the subject himself said though "it looks fairly arty now".

I'll take this weekends race photos in RAW.

Ricky91t

I don't shoot many marathons (well none :pac: )
But shooting raw for most sports is pointless,You end up filling up cards far to quickly,You have a reduced buffer of how many images you can shoot and it takes longer to write the images to the card from the buffer meaning you'll have to wait longer before shooting in burst again..

5uspect

Well I guess the alternative is to check the histogram as you shoot.

radic

Fixed one for ya.