Specific Brighten up!

[Skillen94]

Can someone brighten up just the people in the pic so you can actually see them?? The background is fine just need to edit the people! Thanks!

 

[chrisdesign]

This is my attempt.

 

[thebestcpu]

And here is my try.
It turns out that with the exposure so that the two individuals are both nearly black and that this is a 8 bit compressed JPEG makes it extremely difficult to have a good picture (I don't consider my brightening up a good picture).
To compensate for the embedded noise, the restoration leaves softness which is in a bad contrast with a very nice highly sharp background.
If you have the original Raw file from the camera and could share that through a file sharing site, I can guaranteee that the results would be much much better.
This is the best I could do and it may help with the feeling of the moment yet a Raw file would be needed to do a lot better (at least for my editing skills)

Must have been fantastic to be there for the shot.

John Wheeler

 

[Skillen94]

And here is my try.
It turns out that with the exposure so that the two individuals are both nearly black and that this is a 8 bit compressed JPEG makes it extremely difficult to have a good picture (I don't consider my brightening up a good picture).
To compensate for the embedded noise, the restoration leaves softness which is in a bad contrast with a very nice highly sharp background.
If you have the original Raw file from the camera and could share that through a file sharing site, I can guaranteee that the results would be much much better.
This is the best I could do and it may help with the feeling of the moment yet a Raw file would be needed to do a lot better (at least for my editing skills)

Must have been fantastic to be there for the shot.

John Wheeler

View attachment 82569View attachment 82569

The pic just isn’t good quality that we took! You did a great job though! Can you merge 2 pics together instead? I’m trying to make it a gift but we took several different pics that day! Here’s 2 pics I like the background of the water and the other pic you can see is better!

 

[thebestcpu]

I gave it my best shot yet compositing two images with different lighting, exposure, color temperature, etc is a pretty tough job. Hard not to look as if it is a bit Photoshopped e.g. the couple pasted in the image yet did the best I could in the time I had.
Hope you enjoy the results
John Wheeler

Note: I updated the image as I missed a masking spot on the guys leg in prior version

 

[Skillen94]

Looks great! Thank you!

 

[thebestcpu]

Your welcome. And just for grins for the for the other forum members, here are the steps I used in doing the composite which is match with a GIF file showing the stages. In reality, it was a lot of iteration trying to get the background and foreground looking anything like they might go together using a wide array of tools in the Camera Raw Filter for both the background and foreground

1) Place Background as Smart Object to edit with Camera Raw Filter in iterative fashion
2) Overlay Foreground as Smart Object to edit with Camera Raw Filter in iterative fashion
3) Mask out the undesired foreground elements around the subjects (getting the edges right as we all know takes some time)
4) Final version of background from many iterations with the foreground
5) Final version of foreground form many iterations with the background

I did not have the time to go into the detailed subtleties of lighting so the final image does appear as if there was set lighting in front of the subjects. Definitely good proactive for me as I have a long way to go to productively make the composed images look like the really go together.

John Wheeler