Prob wrong place to ask but what can you do with a pic like this in photoshop. And how can you avoid getting this in the first place. I'm using a Canon A75

Being quite dark (in the foreground) and heavily backlit, you probably should have used your flash to add some light in the foreground.

Hey FJR.

Thanks for posting. I have moved your thread to the Technique forum for you. This should get you a better response on the technique to prevent this from happening.

I can see from the shot that the basic problem is that your photo is backlit and you didn't have any or enough fill flash to lighten up the forground. Your camera metered for outside, not inside. However this can be tricky to because you don't want to blow out the outside.

I'll start you off with that and lets see what some other people have to say.

Like devbobo said, you need to bring up the lighting in the forground to balance with the lighting in the background in some manner, or the background will be way overexposed when you expose for the forground.

The easiest way is to add flash in some manner - it depends, to a certain extent, on the ability of your camera to perform fill flash to flash the forground to match the exposure of the background.... If you camera can shoot in Av mode this MIGHT work depending on whether your camera supports fill flash. Or you could shoot this in full manual mode and adjust the forground exposure to balance that of the outdoors, by setting the aperture for the flash exposure and the shutter speed to set the exposure correctly for the ambient light outdoors.

This is easy to do with a DSLR and an EOS system flash,; not sure how easy this is with your P&S without reading the manual. Read your manual for fill flash, and you may find your answer.

As several people pointed out, this shot is heavily back-lit. There are limits to what you can do in Photoshop, mainly because you need to boost the brightness of the dark faces so much that noise will become unacceptable. The A75 is a great little camera (I have one), but this is exactly the kind of shot that finally drove me to upgrade to a dSLR. The flash would have helped here, but it doesn't have the sophistication of the ETTL system used in Canon's dSLRs. There is a menu setting that lets you control the flash output, but it is only available when you are shooting in manual mode.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Regards,

Richard,

Thank you for responding with your personal knowledge of the A75. Very informative and helpful.

Some of Canon's more sophisticated P&S cameras, like the Powershot series, do have an external shoe for flash, and do support ETTL, don't they? I see that the Powershot S5 IS does accept an external flash. The smaller ones do not have a hot shoe of course, unfortunately.

I know my Powershot G5 supports the use of the 420ex and 550ex external flashes. It actually supports the MT-24ex and the MR-14ex macro strobes, something I had forgotten until I just looked at the box. I may have to play with that ability some.

I agree that this image is awfully dark for salvage in PS. You could try and fashion two images - one for the highlights outside, and one for the children inside, and then combine them in two layers via a mask of some sort. But if this is how the jpg came out of the camera, there is not much hope unless you are willing to put up with a lot of noise in the image.

Originally Posted by pathfinder Richard, Some of Canon's more sophisticated P&S cameras, like the Powershot series, do have an external shoe for flash, and do support ETTL, don't they? I see that the Powershot S5 IS does accept an external flash. The smaller ones do not have a hot shoe of course, unfortunately.

Yep, but not the A75.

Thanks again for all your comments. I have some options controlling the flash on the A75 so I'll try them out. Could someone point me to the 2 mask PS technique and I'll expirement & see what turns out. Right now I'm off on holiday for a few weeks and hopefully will come back with some better pics next time.

Blending two exposures for shadow and highlight is in our tutorial section here - http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1856992

Michael Reichman describes his technique here - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...xposures.shtml
There is more here - http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu.../masking.shtml


There is a video here - http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/...dExposures.mov