Under exsposed, fix it up

[eos30me]

Hi all,

I am new to digital, was out last weekend and deliberately under exsposed most landscape images, I had quite a few with running streams etc. Now how do I select half an image, and edit the other half. For example I have some where there sky is well exsposed but need to bring out the detail in the lower half of an image of a mountain forest. I have Photoshop CS2 plus Archsoft (which came with my Canon gear.

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~meyssens/

[david_arthur_lee]

This is quiet easy to do.
firstly you could take two jpeg shots of the same scene, but if you shot in RAW, you could produce two pictures from the same shot (One underexposed and one overexposed)

Thats one image each to correctly expose two different areas of the scene i.e the sky and the foreground.

Once you have your two images you can open them in Photoshop.
place one image directly on top of the other as a layer.
Highlight the topmost layer and click on ADD LAYER MASK
Now you can use a black and white gradient to blend the two images bearing in mind that black will be transparant and white will be ocaque so make a white to black gradient running from top to bottom to blend in the correctly exposed sky with the correctly exposed foreground.

[halesr]

Since you probably did not take 2 exactly the same exposures of each shot, here is another possible fix.

This is in Photoshop:

1. Add a new adjustment layer> select curves
2. DO NOT adjust the curve, just set the layer mode to MULTIPLY. This will darken the entire image.
3. This layer will appear with an image mask filled with white already in place. Get a nice soft brush, and paint with black where you DO NOT WANT to darken the image. I usually use a brush at less than 100% opacity. BLACK hides the effect of the layer. WHITE reveals the effect of the layer. If you make a mistake, go back and paint with white ON THE MASK with your brush.
4. If the exposure problem is pretty much along a horizontal or vertical line, you can use a gradient fill, which is usually really nice as it gives a gradient for darker to lighter. You will probably have to play around with drawing your graident line until you gain control.

HTH--Rene

[eos30me]

Thanks I will try both options.