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Fixing an Over Exposed Photo

December 2nd, 2007 · 4 Comments



 While rummaging through some old disks while cleaning up my office I came across an old Kodak Photo Disk. There was a time when digital cameras were far too expensive for the average person and when you got your film developed you could get the lab to put the images to a Cd-Rom for you. At the time it was bleeding edge technology. Now the quality of the pictures is not even comparable to that of a cheap digital camera.

 However I came across a fun photo that was really over exposed. What a great opportunity to show you how to fix an over exposed photo in photo shop. This is a super simple technique and does not take a lot of time.

 
 

Before and After Over Exposed

 An over exposed photo is usually one that has been taken in bright conditions like direct sun light, at the beach, or in a snowy surrounding (the snow acts as a huge light reflector). The photo I am using if I remember correctly was taken on a really bright day with a cheap film camera. So let us get started.

  • Open the over exposed photo you want to fix in photo shop. Below is my original.


    • Original Over Exposed
     
     

  • Now we are going to fix the over exposure, yep we get to the problem right away. Select Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights

    • Iamge Adjustment Menu

     

  • You’ll now get the Shadow/Highlights dialog. Click the Show More Options box.


    • Shadow/Highlights small dialog
     

  • Now drag the Amount slider under the Highlights to the right while looking at your photo. By dragging the slider to the right you will begin to remove the over exposure. Once you get it to a point where you think it looks good try sliding the Tonal Width slider to the right a small amount. This will bring out the color.



    •  
     
    Adjusted 1
     

  • Press Ctrl + U on the key board to bring up the Hue/Saturation menu. This will allow us to make the blown out colors a little richer.


    • Hue saturation

     

  • Drag the Saturation slider to the right until you feel the colors have the right amount of richness. In this case I used +12 in the saturation. Be careful not to over saturated the photo. Below is the finished picture and the original.

Finished

Over exposure corrected


Original

Original

 

 As you can see it is really easy to fix an over exposed photograph in photo shop. For more photo shop tutorials on this site just Click Here!

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Tags: Photoshop · Tutorials

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 no imagenileh (Who am I?) // Jan 5, 2008 at 9:36 pm

    thanks for sharing your knowledge and more power..

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  • 2 no imageLouis Besses (Who am I?) // Jan 30, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    Thanks for the information! It was very helpful!

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  • 3 no imageRobert (Who am I?) // Jun 2, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    which photoshop is this? I have photoshop 6.0 and cannot find the shadows/highlights function in my adjust menu, otherwise very informative.

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  • 4 no imageshuja (Who am I?) // Oct 4, 2008 at 7:29 am

    Useful information. However, I may add that in conjunction with shadow/highlights, one can use Exposure adjustment and photo filter commands from the same menu, i.e., image>adjustment>exposure and image>adjustment>photo filter in CS2. They work excellently well to improve overexposed and underexposed photos.

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