Perhaps this has already been discovered by someone else but, if so, I'm
unaware of it.
A couple of days ago I was presented with a flash photo of a couple
taken at a fairly dark restaurant by a person across the table from
them. The flash took a pretty bad toll on the couple's faces and eyes.
Both people were wearing glasses and the flash created a lot of glare
over the eyes. I was able to recover the eyes by methods I'm long
familiar with (healing brush and patch tools along with moving and
reversing all or part of an unaffected eye to replace the affected eye).
However, the too bright skin of nose, forehead, chin and cheeks is a
problem of another sort. The affected areas of the skin weren't
completely blown but clearly needed some work. Also, the amount of work
varied considerably as the brightness varied across the face.
As I was studying the image trying to figure out how best to fix it it
suddenly occurred to me that the too bright areas of skin had an
appearance very much like atmospheric haze... extremely bright but with
detail still visible underneath.
To fix it I added a second layer and hit the top layer with the ACR
dehazing tool. (Thanks, Moose, for teaching me to use it as a filter).
Of course the dehazing tool affected the entire layer so I added a
mask, painted the mask black to display the image underneath and then
used a white paintbrush at medium opacity to gradually recover the
dehazed parts of the image that needed it. It turned out great.
Incidentally, I did not completely remove the bright areas on the face
but merely toned them down dramatically. It still looks like a flash
picture (as it should) but one that was done well.
Unfortunately, for personal reasons related to those in the picture, I'm
not at liberty to show you the images.
Anyhow, just take it on my word that the process works. I suspect there
may be many other instances where overexposure has taken a toll on parts
of an image and the same technique would apply.
Chuck Norcutt
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