Fixing a wedding photo

- [Instructor] Hello friends, this is Chris and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode we will look at how we can fix an exposure issue with a wedding photograph. In here we'll be using Bridge, Camera Raw in Photoshop, although you could also use, do the same thing with Lightroom in Photoshop as well. Alright, well here, let's go and open up this image, I'll press Command + R on a Mac, or Control + R on Windows to open it up. And here we have this image. And first thing I'm gonna do, actually let's crop the photograph. I wanna go ahead and just crop this down a little bit so that you focus in on the bride and the flower girl.

Alright, with this image, one of the things you can see is that her dress is overexposed. They're a little bit in the shadows. So the skin exposure is great, if we zoom in more you can see this. They look good but the dress and the flowers and a couple other things are just over exposed. What the heck do we do? We could of course, try to reduce the whites and modify our settings and stuff like that. But as we do that, can you see how it just makes the skin tones look really kind of strange? So I'm gonna go ahead and bring those values back. And rather than doing that, what we're gonna do is actually export two different options, two different versions of the file.

So here, I'll maybe add a little bit of contrast, slight modifications of some color temperature, and a couple of modifications with that. And then next, simply click Open Image. That will send the file over to Photoshop. And again, in Lightroom you would just export or open it up in Photoshop. Now when we see the image in Photoshop, what we'll start to see is that we have this image by itself and what I wanna do is bring over another version with good exposure for the dress and then combine the two.

So back in Bridge, and we'll re-open this in Camera Raw, Command + R on a Mac, Control + R on Windows. Zoom in a little bit so we can focus in on the dress, then I'm gonna drop my exposure down, change my color temperature, have a warmer color temperature. Try to remove some of the blue that I was seeing in that area. Also go over to HSL Adjustments and drop out some of those blue tones there. And any other tones for that matter. Really just focusing in on the dress that we have.

Good color, good exposure, maybe some clarity, a touch of contrast. I'm gonna make sure it doesn't look kinda too flat in that area. Now we are ignoring the rest of the photograph. We're ignoring what we did to their skin tones. We're just gonna use this as another version. So here, rather than clicking Open Image, press and hold down Option on a Mac, Alt on Windows, and click Open Copy. What that will do is will take those settings and it will open a version of the file in Photoshop with those settings, yet it won't apply those to our raw file that we have here.

So we could always have that one and the other version. Now inside of Photoshop, if we have these side by side you can kinda see the difference of exposure. We'll grab the old Move tool and I'm just gonna click and drag while holding on on the Shift key and that will bring this over in the exact spot where we need it. Now currently, we only need this really on the brighter tone so we'll add a layer mask. And what we can do with this is we can double click that layer mask, open up the Properties panel, go to Color Range and say hey, let's click on an area where we want this to come in and as I click around, you can see how these tones are gonna come into different areas.

And we then can Shift click, and we could add these to other parts of the image. So I'm just gonna go ahead and Shift click around here. We can do this on the image or on the black and white preview that we have here, it's kind of a mask of view of this. Now if it doesn't look great, and looks kind of, I don't know, almost looks a little bit overdone right now. Don't worry about that. We will fix that in a moment. First step is just to get the, get a good mask. Change your Fuzziness slider, it'll soften your edges.

Range is how far it's reaching into other tones. And just get as close as you think it looks decent, and click OK. Now look at your before and after. You can see how, yes, we are correcting exposure in that area. But it's not quite natural looking. Why is that? Well, if I show you a view of the mask for a second, what you can see is that it's just a little bit too, it's not perfect, right? So we need to kinda soften it out. It's not gonna be exact so if just soften this by increasing Feather, what will happen is it will help these different layers to blend in really nicely.

Zoom in so you can see this. Look at the flowers and the arm and different things like that. Can you see how with the feather value, yeah, that's looking better. So I'm getting the benefit of the exposure, but it's not all these weird funky little edges. So just gonna soften out all of that. See how high you can take it before it kinda completely falls apart, 'cause it will reach over or spill over into other areas you might not want it to be in. So you wanna find just the right value there. Then you wanna modify the intensity of this.

So this is currently knocking down the exposure in pretty huge ways. But maybe you just want a little bit less of that so it isn't quite so strong, or maybe you want a little more. I mean it's up to you and also up to the image. I think this one looks kinda good a little bit higher. Alright, well there you have it. A technique that we can use to correct exposure in a wedding photograph. But keep in mind this technique works in landscape photographs, food photography, whatever it is where you have the difficult exposure situation.

You almost need two different versions of the file and then combine those two together. Because in this case the two that we combined is much better than the one by itself, and it gives us a nice even, good exposure so we can capture this moment and have a great picture of these two here. Alright, well that wraps up this week's episode of Photo Tools Weekly. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. See ya next time, bye for now.