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Advanced Question: swapping shadow with light


G

genuinegys

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Hi!,

I have a question considering the photo below (I hope it's clear enought).

voorbeeldje.jpg

Because of the lighting, the small craters in the wall are filled with shadow.
I want to get rid of these shadows and highlight them instead (I want them to be brighter than the rest of the wall).

Everytime I try to select the shadows and replace them with light the edges are to hard and the color difference is too big with the rest of the wall. Also I think my selections aren't precize enought.

Every piece of advise is welcome,

Sincerely,
Gys
 
I would suggest doing cloning / healing on a new layer (with sample all layers selected) and then playing with the blending modes of that new layer , overlay maybe? but remember this : once a detail is lost in photograph it's very hard to recreate it specifically when it comes to shadows
 
To be honest, I'm not entirely certain what you want to accomplish. Can you pls. find an example of the look you want to acheive and post the link. Before-and-after image pairs would be absolutely wonderful. For example, do you want an effect that makes it look like there is a bright light inside of each hole (but you can't see any details), or do you hope to see what's actually in each hole?

With respect to the 2nd possibility, let me give a more direct elaboration on Evil's comment: there is almost no detail in the "holes" in the image you posted. If one attempts to "brighten it", all you will likely wind up with is just noise or blotches. This is why Evil mentioned "recreating" detail. OTOH, if you could supply the raw data file for that image, one could extract detail from the shadow areas much better.

In addition, because of the strong color fringing (aka, chromatic aberration) present in the image you posted, my guess is that it is a crop out of a larger image. This is another reason we need to start with a better quality image.

Tom
 
Perhaps you should try to invert the image, then adjust it as I did. I used adjustment layers: invert, levels, hue sat. The I moved a copy of the original to the top and set it to soft light, about 40%.

Is this the idea you have in mind?

invert.jpg
 
First of all, huge thanks for the reactions.

Evil: It's not my intention to brighten these area's because there's indeed nothing to brighten up there except noise. So it has to be artificial.

Tom: Normally in broad daylight the picture of the wall would look like the one I posted. Because of the sunlight.

I'm trying to achieve the following effect: It's night, and the light is coming from below/in front of the wall.

I did some lighting by using gradients with different blending modes. But these gradients don't affect the shadowy holes in the wall. At least not without ruining the rest of the effects.

Here's an example of the effect I've reached right now:

look.jpg
As you can see the effects don't affect the shadow spots. I want to remain the current effects untouched, so I only want to change the shadow.

ibclare: Excelent idea, I'm going to experiment with that right now. I'll let you guys know if I make any progress.

Meanwhile, I appreciate the input. I believe you guys can help me out with this one.
 
Q1: Every photographer knows that the century-old solution to seeing detail in deep shadows is to use fill flash. If on-camera fill flash is dialed down to say 1.5 stops under the ambient light exposure, the effects of the flash will hardly be visible on the area in sunlight, but will do absolute wonders for the areas in shadow. With 100% confidence, I can guarantee you that this will produce better images than *ANY* amount of post processing.

Is it impossible to simply go back and re-shoot the scene using fill flash? If it is, I highly recommend doing so. It will save us all a LOT of time and effort.
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Q2: A currently in-vogue technique to seeing details in shadow areas is to use HDR (high dynamic range) techniques. This involves taking a range of exposures, each a couple of stops apart. In some, the shadow areas will be exposed perfectly, in others, the midtones will be exposed perfectly, in others, the highlights will be exposed perfectly. These can then blended together to produce an exquisite rendering of the scene, with details in all tonal areas. There are lots and lots of examples of this on the web.

Would it be possible for you to go back to this scene and take multiple exposures (on a tripod, of course)?
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Q3: If you can't re-shoot the scene, the standard techniques to extract the most information from shadow and highlight areas in a single frame include: histogram equalization, as well as any of the various techniques to enhance local contrast while keeping overall contrast roughly constant. The latter include pseudo-HDR techniques, the shadow/highlight tool in PS (with small values of radius), the "detail enhancer" algorithm in NIK Color Efx Pro, and similar software by other vendors.

Have you tried any of these techniques? Below is an example of using some of these techniques on the 1st image you posted + your original, for reference. As you can see, detail in all tonal ranges (including the shadow areas) is now more visible.

voorbeeldje-00_orig.jpg . voorbeeldje-tjm01_acr_BW_EQ_detail_extr-01.jpg

A wide variety of other "looks" are easily obtained. This is why I keep asking for a good example of the look you want to achieve.
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Q4: If, for some reason, you are constrained to work with that one specific image that you posted, by any chance, did you happen to save it to a RAW camera file in addition to the JPG you posted? One can extract much, much more shadow detail out of a high bit depth uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) RAW file compared to an 8 bit per channel JPG.
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Q5 Is this for art or science?

If it's for either, there probably constraints on the technique (and final look). It would likely help us immensely in guiding you if we knew exactly what these are, and have a bit more background about this project.
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Q6: Let me ask once again: "Can you please find an example of the look you want to achieve and post the link. Before-and-after image pairs would be absolutely wonderful."

An example of what didn't work (such as the one you posted) really doesn't help. In contrast, what would help the most is seeing an example of the look you want to achieve, even if it was done by someone else, and even if it depicts overhanging natural rocks or deep shadows in some other scene, not the masonry you want.

HTH,

Tom M
 
PS - Sorry. I forgot to respond to your statement: "It's night, and the light is coming from below/in front of the wall."

Again, the best approach with respect to the quality of the final result would be to re-shoot the scene in the way you describe.

BTW, are you actually starting with a photo, or is the actual application to some sort of computer generated graphic that you need/want to modify? It would be really helpful to know things like this.

T
 

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