Can this be saved?

[Tony M]

I used a polarising filter for this photo. Unfortunately, I didn't notice until I was back at the computer that the sky was almost black. (It was so bright when I took the photo that I couldn't see the camera's LCD very well.) I'd like to recover the blue sky in Lightroom; can anyone suggest how? Increasing luminance doesn't work; I think there just isn't enough blue there.



1/500s at f/9, ISO 100, EF-S 17-85mm, focal length 59mm.

[dje]

Hi Tony

I can't help with Lightroom but I had a crack at it in PS (CS5). Added a Levels adjustment layer and reduced the white point slider down to 196 and the mid-tone slider down to 2.88. The result is a bit noisy but you may get better results working on your original raw file at 16 bit level in CS5.

Dave

[dave keeley]

It may not be acceptable to some from an 'artistic' or 'ethical' perspective... but you could easily import a nice blue sky into the image.

[rpcrowe]

If you have an eye level viewfinder, bright sunlight is the time and place to use it. I really think that anytime I used a CPL, I would prefer an eye level viewfinder.

However if your camera is not quipped with an eye level viewfinder, a Hoodman Loupe or some variation of the Hoodman will allow you to view the LCD in bright conditions.

The Hoodman Loup is fairly expensive but, there are third party loupes such as the one from Cowboy Studio which are considerably less espensive.

NOTE: Do not get the Hoodman HD-300 Video Hood because this is designed for the fold-out LCD on a camcorder. The two reviewers on Amazon who gave this hood bad reviews did not realize that this was not designed for still cameras and they ended up slamming the hood unfairly. Sort of like if they bought a 52mm filter for a lens that required 72mm filters and then slammed the filter because it would not fit their lens.

[Tony M]

Dave (Ellis): I have Photoshop Elements as well as Lightroom, but I opted to do something similar to you in Lightroom, as I can work with the RAW image instead of 8 bits. I remembered the adjustment brush and used it to select the sky. I tried increasing exposure, brightness, saturation, then smoothed the noise by reducing sharpness. It was ok, but I thought, since I've so radically changed the colours (which was my goal anyway), and since there is so little information, or variation, in the sky's colour, why not just dump a new colour onto it? So I did. And here's the result. I could make it even lighter.



Dave (Keeley):

It may not be acceptable to some from an 'artistic' or 'ethical' perspective... but you could easily import a nice blue sky into the image.

What you did was great! How did you do it? For this type of photo, where the sky is virtually non-existent, I don't have a problem with what you did.

Richard, I hadn't heard of a hood loupe. Looks useful, but for now though, I might just take a black bag big enough for my camera and head to fit in!

Thanks very much to you all for your comments.

Tony

[Ryogenetic]

Tony the image can be saved as you can see from others results. With a little time ~15 minutes I came up with this:



Quick run down on my work flow: opened in ACR, bumped the exposure to 2.50 (extreme) hit the recovery 100% and 100% on the sharpening. Dropped the Vib and Sat to -4 and -7, opened in PS as a smart object. Once in PS set the levels on a rasterized image, then added the Jiro Effect. (JE=dup new layer change to Vivid light, CTRL-I to invert, Surface blur 40/40, duplicate layer;(then turn off vivid light layer) change to overlay and opacity to taste (69% in this case). Next I reset the levels, added in new layer set to soft light, went over just the ice in black. Added another layer set to soft light, and added white to the darker spots, set the opacity to 54% (brings out the details in the dark) Next selected all layers and merged down. Last was the sky and the haloing. I chose a blue from the right side of the photo and painted it onto a new layer. Cleaned it up and saved.

Hope that helps
Ryo

[Tony M]

Ryo, thanks for your detailed instructions. You produced a better image than me, and I took more than 15 minutes. Increasing the exposure would have improved mine somewhat. I'll try to reproduce your steps using my tools (Lightroom and Photoshop Elements); I guess you're using PS CS5, and that I won't be able to do exactly the same in PSE.

Tony

[arith]

Couldn't do as well as the others with photoshop; but I did this in Topaz Detail by shifting yellow to blue.

[Colin Southern]

Do you have the RAW file?

[Tony M]

Colin,

Here's a link to the RAW file.

Enjoy!

Tony

[Ryogenetic]

Colin,

Here's a link to the RAW file.

Enjoy!

Tony

Tony that is a different pic you linked. It does give a scale to the scene as I thought the ice formations were inches not hundreds of feet....

Ryo

[Tony M]

Whoops, I got clumsy with the mouse. Here it is.

Here's another photo that shows the scale, with some people scaling the cliff. I hadn't appreciated that the scale might be misleading. The photo hasn't been processed.



Tony

[Ryogenetic]

Tony here is a link to the .tiff I edited off your linked TM2012.RAW, its 57.7MB I wanted you to have it just in-case you cannot get the JE process done in Elements. All that is added it the JE and 2 layers of softlight. It is a Media fire link, so you may get some annoying popup...

Ryo

[Colin Southern]

Whoops, I got clumsy with the mouse. Here it is.

Hi Tony,

That file appears to be a TIFF file, not a RAW file.

[Tony M]

Tony here is a link to the .tiff
...

Ryo

Ryo, thanks very much. I have downloaded it and will try to see what I can do in PS Elements.

Hi Tony,

That file appears to be a TIFF file, not a RAW file.

Colin, it looks to me like a Canon RAW file. I checked by downloading it from my post and opening it in Canon "Digital Photo Professional", which indicated it was RAW. Perhaps I'm missing something; why do you say it's TIFF? I can convert it to DNG if you want.

Tony

[Tony M]

Colin,

I just saw this link that describes the .CR2 format. It's based on the TIFF format, so perhaps that's why the program you used to open it thought it was TIFF.

I have put the DNG format here.

Tony

[Tony M]

Couldn't do as well as the others with photoshop; but I did this in Topaz Detail by shifting yellow to blue.

Steve,

I'd never heard of Topaz Detail. And I see that their Photoshop plugin can also be integrated into Lightroom. I took a quick look at their web site and it looks interesting. I'll come back to Topaz another time and take a closer look at it.

Tony

[Colin Southern]

Here you go ...

ACR + PS (Click for large version)

[dje]

Tony I think your question (thread title) has been answered !

Dave

[Tony M]

Tony I think your question (thread title) has been answered !

Dave

Yes it has.

Colin, can you tell me what you did in ACR and PS? I need to learn how to do this stuff; what I did wasn't as good.

Thanks to all for your help.

Tony