Thoughts on how to fix this photo

[secookie]

Hi

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask - apologies in advance if its not.

I've just got back from our Cub Scout Pack Football Competition, put the photos on the PC and found most of them look like this !!

http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/4584/p1050993zy2.jpg

I've got Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and like the program (it's already got me out of a couple of holes with esp files!).

Is there anything I can do to fix these photos? Any thoughts or advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

Simon

[allicorn]

Oo, its very over exposed. Try on the menu, Adjust->Brightness & Contrast->Histogram Adjust. Drag the little black triangle underneath the graph to the right until its about half way across. Then maybe bump the midtone compression slider on the right upward a bit. The original image is kinda bleached out a bit too much to ever really recover all the detail, but that one tool there should really help.

Beyond that, the Smart Photo Fix tool may be able to improve things a bit further. Its usually on the toolbar right across the top of the screen, on the little dropdown menu from the end of the box that says "Enhance Photo".

Afterward, you might also try either Adjust->Sharpness->Unsharp Mask or High Pass Sharpen to clean up those slightly blurry edges a bit.

Once/if you get some satisfactory results and you want to treat a whole bunch of pictures the same way, you could record a little script of the process and have that automatically process the whole set.

Do do this, turn on the Script toolbar if its not already on, load one of the images up, and hit the Record Script icon. Run through the process that improves the image then hit the Save Script icon. Give it any name you like.

Now you can go to File->Batch Process, use the Browse button to find the folder full of original images, check the "Use Script" and "Silent Mode" boxes and pick the script you just made and named. Select "Overwrite" from the "Save Mode" choices and click the Start button.

The same process you used to fix on of the images will be run over the whole set - should save a bit of time if you have a whole bucketload of images! Make sure you're working on a folder full of copies of the images just in case it all goes horribly wrong

Alli

[secookie]

Many thanks for the thoughts Alli - I'll give it a try tonight.

I put my camera on sports mode (as seemed the logical thing to do when the kids are playing football!). It may be because of the bright sunshine or something but all the ones on this mode have come out like this!!! Rather frustating!!

Thanks again

Simon

[duane518]

Another thing you could try is duplicating the photo and taking the brightness way down to where you can't hardly see the photo, and then duplicating the original again and taking the brightness down to about half way between the dark picture and the original overexposed one.
Then open the HDR photo mixer in PSPX2 and merging the three pictures.
It's not perfect,but a little better. This is what I came up with.

http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k438 ... rFinal.jpg

[swtrans]

http://www.dentontx.net/photoforum/nasty1.jpg

http://www.dentontx.net/photoforum/nasty2.jpg

http://www.dentontx.net/photoforum/nasty3.jpg


crop, clarify, sharpen soft, darken

[allicorn]

Processed as per my previous post.

I wonder which method Secookie ended up using since there seem to be quite a few differing approaches.

Alli