Photoshop To The Rescue Again

Sometimes I like to tweak the exposure of small portions of a photo, e.g. darken highlighted areas or bring out details in the shadows. There are many methods of doing this in Photoshop (and other programs), but I currently only know of two: 1. Joey L's method of working with two layers in Photoshop. 2. Photoshop's dodge and burn tool. On the left, Gene was overexposed. I used Joey L's method and created two layers in Photoshop. In the first layer, Gene was properly exposed (but Herie was underexposed). The second layer was the exact opposite, Herie was properly exposed, while Gene was overexposed. I then removed Gene's face from the second layer, so that his correctly exposed face showed through. For more details, read this.

In this example, I dodged his hair, and the hair above her forehead. I burned the camera-left side of his face (note splotchiness, my bad!), his neck, and parts of her hair.

If you're viewing this on a browser other than Safari, you might notice that the photos on the right look more warm. This is a color space issue. The photos on the left were saved in the ProPhoto RGB color space, while the ones on the right were saved in Adobe RGB. Check out this post for more details.