Copy your picture to a new layer and then with that layer active select Enhance>Enhance Lighting>Fill Flash. Adjust the Lighting and Saturation sliders and see if that helps.
Alternatively, make a selection of the figures, then select Layer>New>New from copy to get a layer that just has the figures on it. Then hold down the Alt key and click on the black & white circle at the bottom of the layers palette — choose Levels from the dropdown menu. This adds a Levels adjustment layer associated just with the figure layer. In levels you can adjust over all brightness/contrast or work with individual red, green or blue channels.
As far as I know, there really isn’t a cut and dried method for doing exposure correction. Every photograph I work with seems to have its own set of idiosyncrasies to deal with. But I would probably start out with a duplicate layer, and change it to screen mode. This is going to lighten up the entire photograph far too much. Then I would probably use different adjustment layers (levels, brightness/contrast, Hue/saturation, etc.) to try to manipulate the levels until they appear somewhat normal.
I’m not sure I understand the second part of your question. If you have some "normally" exposed faces, I would probably scan that photograph and then create a multilayered document that had your normal photograph on one layer and a your other photograph on another layer. If that really sounds off base, then apparently I didn’t understand what you meant.
Ray: Assuming there’s some detail left, i.e., the shadowed faces aren’t so underexposed that they’re really solid black, there are lots of ways to approach the problem; Bob and Jim have already given you a couple good ones. If it’s just the faces you want to bring up, another option is to ‘burn’ them in. I don’t like using the Burn tool, even on a duplicate layer, because its effects aren’t reversible. However, this approach works great for me (from Scott Kelby’s new book)
1. Create a new layer (Layer<New Layer); in the New Layer pop-up, change Mode to Soft Light and check the box that says FIll with soft light neutral color (50% gray)
2. In your layers palette, make sure you’ve got the new layer active.
3. In your Color Picker in the tool bar, set the foreground and background
colors to their defaults (black and white) by clicking on the overlapping black and white squares.
4. To lighten your image, first make white the foreground color by clicking on the two-headed arrow in the Color Picker. Then go to the brush tool, pick a soft brush, set the mode to normal and the opacity very low (say 20% or even less). Then, with the new gray layer still active, begin to paint on the face with white; you should see the detail start to come up; keep painting until you get it the way you want it.
5. If you go too far or you want to darken part of the image, go back to the color picker and swap black for white as your foreground color. As you paint with black, the image will darken.
It sounds a little complicated, but it’s a lot of fun actually!
Chuck
Ray,
The method Chuck describes is a really neat trick… try it with the blend mode set as "Overlay", as well, for a different tone.
Byron
Another way that sometimes works fine for me -not always- is to create new layer, remove colour, invert to negative, Gaussian blurr and use the slider in the layers menu to adjust.
This is somewhat like the way some hi-tech RA4 printers cope with the contrasts in negatives.
Leen
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions.I will try them all and I am sure that one of them will do the job.
Again,thanks for the help.I appreciate it.
Ray Jacobs
