lower exposure in specific area of photo?

[rocyn]

Hi,

I don't even know if this is possible to do. I have a picture of my daughter playing in a fountain and her head is thrown back so the full light of the extremely bright, exactly overhead sun is on her face. Is there anything I can do to tone that down on her face only? Any other suggestions for this picture?

I was hoping to find a more urban backdrop to use in place of the park, but apparently I don't have anything like that in my collection. Go figure.

I welcome any suggestions!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8130291@N07/541678824/

Thank you!

Cynthia

[LeeOtsubo]

If you want to fix this specific image, there's not a lot you can do. You can selectively darken her face but there's not enough there to work with and it's very overexposed. When pixels go pure white like that, there are no details to be recovered. Here's a histogram (http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/gallery/view_img.php?id=21627)of that image. Notice how the graph stacks up on the right side of the chart. That means you have many pixels that are pure white.

To avoid avoid this in the future, use your exposure compensation (EC) control to dial back the exposure until the right edge of your histogram ends at the right side, like this (http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/gallery/view_img.php?id=21635).

[Wendy]

Hi Cynthia ...

You may not be able to make the image perfect but you can improve on it ..

I duplicated the layer and then changed the blend mode of the layer to mutlply ... then I used the mask from Grant's tool set and filled the mask with black (to hide the changes I just made)
next I selected white as my foreground colour, lowered the opacity of the brush and painted over the areas of the image that were too light ..

As I said its not going to be perfect but you certainly can improve it :)

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/19XkAl1J1tkDo4ACMfPhy89Ea1k7_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=19XkAl1J1tkDo4ACMfPhy89Ea1k7)

Wendy

[rocyn]

Thanks guys!

I still haven't explored all the features of my camera. I didn't realize the exposure compensation could be used when the flash was not. I shall have to find my manual.

Cynthia