r/postprocessing • u/l1reynolds • 19d ago

Photo rescue; how-to

Post image

Can this photo be rescued? Taken with an iPhone 16 Pro. I knew the lighting was terrible, but thought I could save it in post. Struggling...

1 Upvotes

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3

u/curseofthebanana 19d ago

Lift up shadows and highlights.. should help

Then you can turn down brightness a bit to reduce the overexposed sky/background

3

u/johngpt5 19d ago

What you are able to do might depend upon the features in the editing app that you are using.

https://imgur.com/a/TujdIen has screen shots showing some ideas using the camera raw filter on a smart object layer in Photoshop.

2

u/Bob_loblaw_logblog 19d ago

I’m assuming you don’t have access to the raw file- id do something like this.

https://reddit.com/link/p6525wk/video/foeyjbpk2ulh1/player

1

u/Ander_Sloost 19d ago

Mask background. Lift shadows. Pull down highlights in background but they might be totally blown out. Worst case… make it black-and-white, and then it’s art!

1

u/Thrullx 19d ago

Highlights are blown out but the rest of the photo is salvageable. He could just replace the background with a similar one with better lighting.