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Correction for Bad Lighting
I’ve got a shot that’s badly lit and I want to salvage it. It was shot documentary style in India, with a PD-150 on full auto, DV mode. It’s in a dorm room of an orphanage. In the foreground there are some precious, smiling kids. But in the background, there’s a window blown-out with natural outdoor light that’s white hot. So, obviously, the kids faces are pretty dark. Correcting for gamma gets a good amount of definition in their faces, but leaves the window blown out. What’s a better way to fix this, if there is one?
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2 Replies
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If the kids’ heads are not in the window frame, you could duplicate the layer, crop it to cover just the window, and adjust the layer with the kids to bring out their faces, letting the window get as blown out as it wants, then adjust the cropped layer to bring the window levels down to where you want them.
Sometimes adjusting just the gamma can help too because it doesn’t increase the whites and blacks, mostly just the mid-tones (with some exceptions).
Ed -
Try using Lyric Image Control>Shadow-Highlight.
http://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/
It works like Shadow Highlight in Photoshop. It allows you to dramatically bring up shadows and decrease highlights. It’s saved many a shot for me.
pxlmvr
John A. Calhoun
Zone Communication Group
Cincinnati, Ohio
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