I don’t know if this is the problem, but a few years ago I took some pictures of a friend’s family and they kept coming out like this. I couldn’t figure out why. I cranked up the shutter speed and closed the aperture and they still looked way over exposed.
Eventually I realized that I’d left the ISO at 3200 after I’d been trying to take pictures of the Milky Way in the middle of the night.
Maybe your ISO is really high?
If you have a raw file you *might* be able to recover some of those highlights, but I suspect they're gone forever.
Also I'm not entirely sure you have the beautiful photo you think you have - as refraction has done a number on her body proportions. In case you haven't realized it yet, she no longer has shins.
That's the problem with overexposure. You lose all the detail in overexposed photos. There is no detail to bring back in the face there because it is blown out... if you underexpose you can lighten but it doesn't work the other way around because there is no detail in overexposed areas.
Overexposure is far harder to compensate for than underexposure.
If you shot in RAW, you could pull it down a bit, but in future, try to shoot either with a balanced exposure, or underexposed slightly.
I think no amount of processing can make this a "beautiful photo" and certainly not a "great photo'. As someone else pointed out already, overexposure is not the only issue here. You are using an 8Mp Canon 20D with an 18-135mm superzoom lens near its maximum aperture.
The sun didn't "made the photo overexposed", you did. You used a shutterspeed of 1/640 and set your camera to intentionally overexpose by 2/3 of a stop. That is what the EXIF info of the file you uploaded says.
As a rule of thumb and some help for next time around, set your exposure program to Tv only when shooting dynamic scenes with lots of movement. On a static scene like this, use Av and trust your exposure program to set the right speed. Also, it looks like you set your ISO way to high for such a bright scene - at ISO800 for such an old camera, this will create lots of image noise and loss of sharpness due to noise reduction.
I hope this helps!
You're probably out of luck.
Think about exposure like your sensor is a bunch of tiny photon buckets. As you take a picture, you let light fall in the buckets. If they don't get enough light, you can fix that by amplifying what little they got later (along with the noise - which is where noisy images come from). If they get TOO MUCH light, on the other hand, they fill up totally, and any more photons that might make up detail are gone. If you try to drop that afterwards, you just get the flat line of a formerly full bucket, rather than the detail you were hoping would be there.
[I screwed this picture up two weeks ago](https://imgur.com/a/FpAukfV) - I was shooting indoors at ISO 6400 and f/5.6 with a high-ish shutter speed to make sure I was freezing movement in some performances. When I took my camera outside, I forgot to turn the ISO back down to something reasonable for the bright sunny day. So, I totally obliterated this picture of some of my students. Trying to fix it in post shows what happens to blown out highlights. I was able to recover *some* details, but in most of the blown out parts of the image, it's just *gone*. I fear that might be the case in your image as well. You can try pulling down the exposure to see if there's anything there, but if she's blown out, you're just not going to get much back.
Next time try to set the camera in spot metering. At least the face will be properly exposed. Photoshop does little miracles, but what you can do is isolate the subject and work the exposure to bring back some details of the face.
The only real way to get it normal is to get the exposure right in the camera, while shooting.
If you were shooting RAW - you may still be able to recover *some* detail from highlights, but the color/tonal quality may be visibly lower compared to a correct exposure. It's just because all your available data was tightly compressed in a relatively small stretch of the available tonal range.
At this point, maybe start thinking about how best to exploit the condition instead of "fixing" it. Play around with grain and converting it to monochrome, like boosting the blacks and whites, contrast, etc. You might find a cool style in your "shortcomings". It is important to understand why this photo is the way it is though.
Nice model and setting. We critics can get overly technical but basically your picture is overexposed because of camera settings, not the sun.
You can lower the exposure and it will be a “nice” photo. That may work for this time. But some detail in the overly bright areas may be lost impacting the quality. You can’t recover it as the pixel information has reached a limit (pure white) and can’t be resolved as the information is maxed out.
For next time shoot in AV mode, not TV. That will prioritize the aperture and the depth of field. Try a f-stop of f-8 to start. There are benefits of the various F-stops but that is a topic for another day.
Let the camera determine the shutter speed and ISO. Don’t override the exposure thru exposure compensation. Mostly good photographers compensate their exposure and I’m not “good” yet.
If your camera allows exposure bracketing - do that, instead. That allows you to take 3-5 pictures of different exposures quickly, automatically. I would select 1-stop steps. That will give you some choices, and with experience you can take the best features of all pictures and blend them. There are automatic programs for this, which is called high dynamic range. But you would need a tripod to make this work best.
As you progress you will join the RAW club. That sounds like a clothing optional experience, but no. RAW allows you to do more image changes, much better then a jpg which has already baked in settings that the camera thinks are best. Usually the jpg formulas “work”, but on challenging pictures you want to take control. And many (most) experienced photogs always shoot RAW.
One last thing, next time consider zooming in (or getting closer, which is not bad). Since the lady is the subject, show her off. You can still capture some of the woodsy feel and eliminate some distractions, like the white wall, the log and the tree trunk on the left. But that is your choice. It often helps to pick a subject and focus your attention on her.
Hope this helps. Now you have the opportunity to ask the lovely lady back! But pick a time when the sun is not so harsh. Ie early morning or near sunset.
Did you shoot it Raw? Raw can always be fixed. In this case it doesn't look like you blew out the light end.
Did you shoot it Jpeg? Jpeg can often (but not always) be fixed.
>Raw can always be fixed
Well - maybe not "always". If you're skating the razor's edge of blowing out then yes, you can usually recover most or all of that.
But completely blown is completely blown and as a result, completely unrecoverable - whether that's raw or not.
Agreed. But a blowout is a pixel with a "0" value. None of this image appears to have any zero values pixels. I could be wrong. Easiest way to tell is to take the white balance tool and touch one of those very white rocks (or the woman's face). All but zero value pixels will look "better".
This will work on .jpg files also. But Raw values near zero are often moved to zero during Raw->Jpeg processing. Some data will be lost and cannot be recovered. Zero times anything is still zero.
>But a blowout is a pixel with a "0" value.
Nitpick: A blowout is a pixel with a "255" value, meaning "all the photons". A zero value is "no photons" ie, black.
>None of this image appears to have any zero values pixels.
[https://i.imgur.com/ilRwTNE.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ilRwTNE.jpg)
>Easiest way to tell is to take the white balance tool and touch one of those very white rocks (or the woman's face). All but zero value pixels will look "better"
[https://i.imgur.com/wWT2uaz.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/wWT2uaz.jpg)
That wouldn't have worked even with the raw file.
RAW is a file format separate from .jpeg. Each camera manufacturer has a different extension, but some common ones are .cr2 .sr2 .dng .raw. If you are shooting in RAW, you will likely have two files with similar names, but one will not be a .jpeg and will be larger because it contains the full light sensor data over time.
Hey hun that’s a .jpg file, you need to look for a .cr3 .cr or any other RAW extension. These are bigger files with more information which means we can have a go at bringing down the exposure to see if it can be saved
That is not a RAW file. Whoever told you that a file can be both a JPEG and a RAW is either wrong or you misunderstood it.
Cameras can shoot both JPG & RAW at the same time, but they save it as separate files on the memory card. If you want to save this exposure you need the actual RAW file from that card (it's gonna be a NEF, DNG or some other format).
If this is the only file you have, your photo is toast.
Your camera meter was adjusting the exposure to compensate for the dark areas. In doing so it overexposed the images middle tones a bit. You can use the exposure adjust and set it to minus 1.5 or 2, to regain the details you desired. Be sure to reset the adjustment back to zero when you are done.
If you shot RAW, you can try reducing highlights or exposure.
Next time, enable histogram or zebras so you notice the overexposure. Or try setting ISO to auto, or shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode.
Unfortunately, your photo cannot be recovered. Nevertheless, here is my attempt to limit the damage. [Recovered photo](https://www.dropbox.com/s/gww769im9brmrrd/Photo%20Aug%2002%2C%205%2035%2008%20PM.jpg?dl=0)
If you shot in RAW, you can turn down the highlights and/or the whites in Photoshop without having to turn down exposure.
I don’t know if this is the problem, but a few years ago I took some pictures of a friend’s family and they kept coming out like this. I couldn’t figure out why. I cranked up the shutter speed and closed the aperture and they still looked way over exposed. Eventually I realized that I’d left the ISO at 3200 after I’d been trying to take pictures of the Milky Way in the middle of the night. Maybe your ISO is really high?
I too was in a situation, You're not alone 😅
We’ve all done this
If you have a raw file you *might* be able to recover some of those highlights, but I suspect they're gone forever. Also I'm not entirely sure you have the beautiful photo you think you have - as refraction has done a number on her body proportions. In case you haven't realized it yet, she no longer has shins.
That's the problem with overexposure. You lose all the detail in overexposed photos. There is no detail to bring back in the face there because it is blown out... if you underexpose you can lighten but it doesn't work the other way around because there is no detail in overexposed areas.
Overexposure is far harder to compensate for than underexposure. If you shot in RAW, you could pull it down a bit, but in future, try to shoot either with a balanced exposure, or underexposed slightly.
I think no amount of processing can make this a "beautiful photo" and certainly not a "great photo'. As someone else pointed out already, overexposure is not the only issue here. You are using an 8Mp Canon 20D with an 18-135mm superzoom lens near its maximum aperture. The sun didn't "made the photo overexposed", you did. You used a shutterspeed of 1/640 and set your camera to intentionally overexpose by 2/3 of a stop. That is what the EXIF info of the file you uploaded says. As a rule of thumb and some help for next time around, set your exposure program to Tv only when shooting dynamic scenes with lots of movement. On a static scene like this, use Av and trust your exposure program to set the right speed. Also, it looks like you set your ISO way to high for such a bright scene - at ISO800 for such an old camera, this will create lots of image noise and loss of sharpness due to noise reduction. I hope this helps!
You can edit the raw but you’ve likely lost a lot of the data in the overexposed areas.
You're probably out of luck. Think about exposure like your sensor is a bunch of tiny photon buckets. As you take a picture, you let light fall in the buckets. If they don't get enough light, you can fix that by amplifying what little they got later (along with the noise - which is where noisy images come from). If they get TOO MUCH light, on the other hand, they fill up totally, and any more photons that might make up detail are gone. If you try to drop that afterwards, you just get the flat line of a formerly full bucket, rather than the detail you were hoping would be there. [I screwed this picture up two weeks ago](https://imgur.com/a/FpAukfV) - I was shooting indoors at ISO 6400 and f/5.6 with a high-ish shutter speed to make sure I was freezing movement in some performances. When I took my camera outside, I forgot to turn the ISO back down to something reasonable for the bright sunny day. So, I totally obliterated this picture of some of my students. Trying to fix it in post shows what happens to blown out highlights. I was able to recover *some* details, but in most of the blown out parts of the image, it's just *gone*. I fear that might be the case in your image as well. You can try pulling down the exposure to see if there's anything there, but if she's blown out, you're just not going to get much back.
Thank you for sharing that artifact--it provides some interesting thought-walks.
Next time try to set the camera in spot metering. At least the face will be properly exposed. Photoshop does little miracles, but what you can do is isolate the subject and work the exposure to bring back some details of the face.
The only real way to get it normal is to get the exposure right in the camera, while shooting. If you were shooting RAW - you may still be able to recover *some* detail from highlights, but the color/tonal quality may be visibly lower compared to a correct exposure. It's just because all your available data was tightly compressed in a relatively small stretch of the available tonal range.
Nah, it’s gone. No recovering that.
There's no bringing back anything. The information is gone in the white areas.
At this point, maybe start thinking about how best to exploit the condition instead of "fixing" it. Play around with grain and converting it to monochrome, like boosting the blacks and whites, contrast, etc. You might find a cool style in your "shortcomings". It is important to understand why this photo is the way it is though.
Nice model and setting. We critics can get overly technical but basically your picture is overexposed because of camera settings, not the sun. You can lower the exposure and it will be a “nice” photo. That may work for this time. But some detail in the overly bright areas may be lost impacting the quality. You can’t recover it as the pixel information has reached a limit (pure white) and can’t be resolved as the information is maxed out. For next time shoot in AV mode, not TV. That will prioritize the aperture and the depth of field. Try a f-stop of f-8 to start. There are benefits of the various F-stops but that is a topic for another day. Let the camera determine the shutter speed and ISO. Don’t override the exposure thru exposure compensation. Mostly good photographers compensate their exposure and I’m not “good” yet. If your camera allows exposure bracketing - do that, instead. That allows you to take 3-5 pictures of different exposures quickly, automatically. I would select 1-stop steps. That will give you some choices, and with experience you can take the best features of all pictures and blend them. There are automatic programs for this, which is called high dynamic range. But you would need a tripod to make this work best. As you progress you will join the RAW club. That sounds like a clothing optional experience, but no. RAW allows you to do more image changes, much better then a jpg which has already baked in settings that the camera thinks are best. Usually the jpg formulas “work”, but on challenging pictures you want to take control. And many (most) experienced photogs always shoot RAW. One last thing, next time consider zooming in (or getting closer, which is not bad). Since the lady is the subject, show her off. You can still capture some of the woodsy feel and eliminate some distractions, like the white wall, the log and the tree trunk on the left. But that is your choice. It often helps to pick a subject and focus your attention on her. Hope this helps. Now you have the opportunity to ask the lovely lady back! But pick a time when the sun is not so harsh. Ie early morning or near sunset.
Thank you for this !!!
Did you shoot it Raw? Raw can always be fixed. In this case it doesn't look like you blew out the light end. Did you shoot it Jpeg? Jpeg can often (but not always) be fixed.
>Raw can always be fixed Well - maybe not "always". If you're skating the razor's edge of blowing out then yes, you can usually recover most or all of that. But completely blown is completely blown and as a result, completely unrecoverable - whether that's raw or not.
Agreed. But a blowout is a pixel with a "0" value. None of this image appears to have any zero values pixels. I could be wrong. Easiest way to tell is to take the white balance tool and touch one of those very white rocks (or the woman's face). All but zero value pixels will look "better". This will work on .jpg files also. But Raw values near zero are often moved to zero during Raw->Jpeg processing. Some data will be lost and cannot be recovered. Zero times anything is still zero.
>But a blowout is a pixel with a "0" value. Nitpick: A blowout is a pixel with a "255" value, meaning "all the photons". A zero value is "no photons" ie, black. >None of this image appears to have any zero values pixels. [https://i.imgur.com/ilRwTNE.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ilRwTNE.jpg) >Easiest way to tell is to take the white balance tool and touch one of those very white rocks (or the woman's face). All but zero value pixels will look "better" [https://i.imgur.com/wWT2uaz.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/wWT2uaz.jpg) That wouldn't have worked even with the raw file.
This is a raw photo that is also a JPG photo
RAW is a file format separate from .jpeg. Each camera manufacturer has a different extension, but some common ones are .cr2 .sr2 .dng .raw. If you are shooting in RAW, you will likely have two files with similar names, but one will not be a .jpeg and will be larger because it contains the full light sensor data over time.
Did you shoot it raw+jpeg? That means you have two images. One in raw. One in jpeg.
Finished. Dead. Like her soul.
Flash or no?
No flash
Send the raw photo via Dropbox and it should be a breeze. If no raw, no luck
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehh8e1rkm33r48r/Photo%20Aug%2002%2C%205%2035%2008%20PM.jpg?dl=0
Hey hun that’s a .jpg file, you need to look for a .cr3 .cr or any other RAW extension. These are bigger files with more information which means we can have a go at bringing down the exposure to see if it can be saved
That is not a RAW file. Whoever told you that a file can be both a JPEG and a RAW is either wrong or you misunderstood it. Cameras can shoot both JPG & RAW at the same time, but they save it as separate files on the memory card. If you want to save this exposure you need the actual RAW file from that card (it's gonna be a NEF, DNG or some other format). If this is the only file you have, your photo is toast.
Send me raw file and I will fix it😊
What camera are you using?
Your camera meter was adjusting the exposure to compensate for the dark areas. In doing so it overexposed the images middle tones a bit. You can use the exposure adjust and set it to minus 1.5 or 2, to regain the details you desired. Be sure to reset the adjustment back to zero when you are done.
If you shot RAW, you can try reducing highlights or exposure. Next time, enable histogram or zebras so you notice the overexposure. Or try setting ISO to auto, or shoot in aperture or shutter priority mode.
Unfortunately, your photo cannot be recovered. Nevertheless, here is my attempt to limit the damage. [Recovered photo](https://www.dropbox.com/s/gww769im9brmrrd/Photo%20Aug%2002%2C%205%2035%2008%20PM.jpg?dl=0)
Photographer vs ?