EZ Adjustment of Specific Areas in Photos

[gerberbaby1]

I am new to PSE6 and am wondering if anyone has an EZ step by step approach to adjusting specific areas in a photo that have exposure problems. Example: Photo of two people with one face over or under exposed. Another example would be adjusting a photo with a spot of sunlight shining on a head of hair--rest of photo basically OK. Am not sure which option in PSE6 would be the easiest or most ideal to use.
Thanks for your help.

[jjvera00]

If you can post a picture we can be of better help to advise you how to fix your pictures.

But for now, you may want to try a few options:

Enhance>Auto Levels
Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Shadows/Highlights
Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness/Contrast
Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels

[gerberbaby1]

This photo is an example of a photo in which one face (the child's) is overexposed and the mother's is underexposed. What would be the best way to to edit this photo. I have already applied simple edits to this one--although I can't be sure at this point what those were. (BTW is there a way to tell what edits you've used after the fact??)

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1LRsArEL70ZNmpx0gkdOyhhV6uvIlW1_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1LRsArEL70ZNmpx0gkdOyhhV6uvIlW1)

[gerberbaby1]

This is a photo with a spot of sunlight on the child's hair.
Thanks in advance for any help/hints you can give.

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1NCPly64mIbndlpVVmCoMF4aE9nZMi0_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1NCPly64mIbndlpVVmCoMF4aE9nZMi0)

[emkayess65]

Hi gerberbaby, I took a try at fixing one of your pictures.
I selected the little guy and put him on his own layer.
Ctrl+J.
Then I ran a Levels adjustment on just the boy.
Ctl+L = levels and adjusted the triangles under the histogram
until they are under the beginning of where the "hill" begins.
The middle slider makes it lighter if pulled to the left (makes the area between the middle and right larger) and darker if pulled right( makes the area between middle and black larger).

I cloned the sunspot with the clone tool , blendmode darken and opacity of tool at 22.
To change the color of the dark hair to the back of his head I made a new layer at the top
of the stack and set the blendmode of the layer to color.
I changed the foreground color chip with the eye dropper tool by sampling from the front of the head. I painted over the darker hair with a brush.

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1jfMF1OPsBVSv2Lue7qVnkHCmgmGl0_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1jfMF1OPsBVSv2Lue7qVnkHCmgmGl0)

Cute little guy.
Hth

mks

[Simenon]

Hi - I took a stab at one of your photos. The basic fixes were done in Elements, but some of the lighting and toning effects were done with plug-ins most notably NIK Color Efex and Tiffen's DFX. Basically I evened out the overall skin tones by using a Hue\Sat adjustment layer to reduce the Reds a bit and then used a layer mask to paint out the areas I wished to keep. Then I used an unadjusted Levels layer set to Screen blend mode to bring out Mom's eyes and again used a layer mask to reveal just the eyes. I think I repeated that one time. I also applied a Gaussian blur to a portion of the background where the window shadow is placed. I did a little cloning on Mom's right cheek which had some uneven skin tone, but otherwise made no effort to reduce wrinkles or such which are minor in any case. I did set the skin tone to a warmer effect which I felt was pleasing, but a cooler skin tone could have been used just as well. Somewhere along the way I did boost the contrast slightly. I did reduce the picture to 72 ppi and a 1024 pixel width for faster processing. Sorry I don't remember precisely all that I did, as I did not save the PSD file, and only belatedly decided to post the picture to the forum. I use PSE4.

Johnny has outlined some good basic steps in his post about your pictures.

~ Simenon

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1K4ngh4N9JZaIaxXRtwQ829QnCqls1_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1K4ngh4N9JZaIaxXRtwQ829QnCqls1)

[gerberbaby1]

Thanks so much for your input on editing this photo. I appreciate the ideas and like your interpretation. Thanks...Gerberbaby

[Priyanka Azad]

Hi You could use simple techniques like:
> Enhance > Adjust color > Replace color
> Enhance > Hue saturation\Layers
> Dodge and Burn tools

and if you have multiple photos with different areas exposed, you can combine them to one using Photomerge faces/groupshots

It just playing around with the product and seeing which is the best fix for your pics.

Hope it helps
~Pri

[charlotteinkennesaw]

Wow, you guys are awesome! I wonder if I will ever understand it all.:o
Very impressive Simeon.