Request for help touching up still

[mg262]

@all,

I need to touch up this shot for a charity I work with:

Small Image (down sampled by 4 either way):
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mg262/posts/familyI_small.JPG

The full resolution version can be found here:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mg262/posts/familyI.JPG

It would be particularly useful to remove the glare from the window.

I'm not sure whether there's enough information to make anything decent out of this, but I know that if it's possible someone here will do it! Any ideas or scripts would be very much appreciated. [It's just this one still that needs editing, so AVISynth may be overkill... but it's the tool I understand best, and it makes it easy to try out peoples suggestions. If anyone can get something decent out of another program, that would be just as good.]

[Video Dude]

You would really need Photoshop to fix the still.

I would suggest trying the trial version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0. It has many wizards and macros that can do some very good automatic correction.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/main.html
Click on Tryout to get the trial version.
You have to register with Adobe to download it, but its free.

[Pookie]

http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/dcenhancer.htm

http://www.mediachance.com/digicam/filtersim.htm

http://www.snapfiles.com/opinions/IRIS/IRIS.html

Just for starters, and of course you'll have to try them out to see if it helps.

You'll notice on this mask where the faces are affected by the blow-out of the sunlight.

http://www.uploadhouse.com/images/286911386familyI_filtereds.jpg (http://www.uploadhouse.com/)

[Fluffbutt]

Here's my super quickie attempt (about 3 mins).

Note that there's just not any graphic information in the window and some peoples heads - it's just not there..

[vidhead]

imo your objective - remove glare - as you already suspect, is quite impossible. there's nothing there that i can see except around the edges of the window frames. is this the only original pix or a snapshot from digital video/camera?

if you have a series of shots that the "missing" parts are visible you would work with that with photoshop, layers, multiply, filters, etc. probably ends up looking quite artificial...anyhow, natural setting, strong sunlight, faces identifiable, that pix look fine.

[Fluffbutt]

There is one other thing you can do.

Like vidhead suggested - but go back and take a picture from the same location on a lightly cloudy day, then use photoshop to blend the two images together. You'll be replacing the blown hilights with a new image.

[Mug Funky]

hmm. that pic could benefit a little from curve adjustment - just to bring the darks up to the level of the lighter parts, and make the blowout less obvious. it's like a gamma correction, but preserves a little more saturation.

definitely photoshop or similar is needed for this (though running it through fft3dfilter could help :)).

this is why i shoot in raw whenever possible, and bracket shots when it's not possible to shoot raw. of course that means taking more photos and boring everyone while you take them, but in the end there's more to work with - raw pics use all 12 bits of the CCD, and DCraw will decode it into 16bpc photoshop files which are quite good to work with. of course, photoshop doesn't allow you to do much in 16 bit mode (damn adobe right to hell), but at the very least there's colour adjustments, simple masking abilities and clone/heal tools available. everything else requires 8-bits per channel.

[Joel Cairo]

I've had to re-size this attempt to fit within the Forum attachment guidelines, but if the general tonal balance is a little more to your liking, I can send the full-size version to you via e-mail.

-Kevin

[mg262]

Guys, thank you for the thoughts/help! The main thing that I was asked to do was to reduce the glare/blowout from the window -- and I couldn't get anything that made much difference. There is just not enough colour depth, as vidhead suggested. It's rather hard to go back, says the photo is from Belarus, where the charity (http://www.bridgestobelarus.org.uk/) works! But, the main event the photo was wanted for is now over, so it's not worth spending too much effort on the photo -- I'm sorry I didn't say as much earlier...

@Joel Cairo, thank you especially and welcome to the forum!