I took the pic below this morning. The sun/sky has come out ok but the foreground detail (eg the bike!) is hidden due to being completely underexposed.

So what should I do with photoshop type software (actually paint.net here) to try and get both properly exposed? I had a quick play with levels, just increasing the luminousity of the very darkest colours to get this which is ok but not great. Is that the right approach?

TIA

What format do you have the original image in?

jpeg or RAW?

just jpeg – I’m no photographer – it’s just off my phone.

And do you have the extended version of Photoshop?

Buy a flash?

Ah ok…doesn’t matter about the extended version of PS then.

I could have helped if it was RAW, but not so much with jpeg.

I don’t think there’s much you’ll be able to do without ending up with a unusable image.

use shadows/highlights

OK, thanks all, sounds like that’s about as good as it’ll get then.

not a chance. any information in the shadows that you try to lighten will be posterised and noisy. you will not be able to lift the white areas of the bike to a white and maintain a full range of tones.

^^ the low light has made for a very noisy image

There’s a few things I would try, although being a bit rubbish on Photoshop they might not be technically correct.

I would do a bit of ‘dodging & burning’ on the darker areas – there’s a Scott Kelby book that describes the technique quite well.
But, in your image the foreground is so dark it wouldn’t look pretty. I use that more for small adjustments.

You could add a mask and fiddle with levels, but again I think you are stuck because you are trying to make such an extreme change.

I would have thought only way to do it would be to take multiple images & merge (not easy with phone pics/no alignment) or use a ND grad filter.

I wonder if you can get an app that adds a software ND grad filter to a camera sensor. That would be cool, because it could probably sense the lighter area & put an exact ND grad in place.

To be honest, I think your efforts above look ok.

You may just reveal more noise, but if in photoshop, I would use a curves adjustment layer with a graduated mask, so that the top part doesn’t get altered, but the bottom gets the near-blacks raised.
This would give you back the very deep blues at the top corners of the image.
Basically the gist of this would be to apply the curves adjustments to the bottom part of the image only.

You could also do this (if your image editing software doesn’t have masks, or adjustment layers) by creating a copy of the image in a new layer, adjusting the curves until you are happy with the bottom, and then erasing the sky area to reveal the original image beneath.

you could be at it for years

http://www.steves-digicams.com/knowledge-center/how-tos/photo-software/how-to-fake-hdr-in-photoshop.html

I’d do something like the above link. create a new layer adjust it until the bike is as you want and then using an airbrush erase the top bit of that layer.

I’d also stay in bed longer so there was proper light 😉

That doesn’t look bad actually – thanks for that – which technique did you use?

three layers, one was adjusted using shadows and hightlights to give harder lines, one just brightened right up using levels and the orignal (as a multiply with a gradient mask to retain the sky). Blend them to get the effect.

collapse it down curves, levels, despeckle.

duplicate the layer, highpass filter set to soft light and collapse to sharpen.

Clever stuff – thanks – most helpful – been playing with the levels myself though I can’t quite do it as well as you did 🙂

If you want to have a go with levels, curves, filters, masks, etc but don’t have the tools, try Pixlr. It’s a basic online photo editing thing, but it has a few of the more useful features present in Photoshop.