Dark Images

newtoboards

I have a few images that were taken without flash inside using a Nikon DSLR camera (don't know the model as it wasn't mine just borrowed for the night). I would like to try to brighten the images in some way and make them brighter. Any recommendations of a program that will do this without reducing the quality of the picture???

CabanSail

There are many programs to attempt this. Picassa, GIMP, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc etc.

The program is not so much the issue, rather how much data you have. If you have shot in JPEG then you will not have recorded the shadow detail & if it's clipped then that's it I am afraid. There still may be some improvements made, but how much will depend on the images.

If you have happened to have shot in RAW then there will be more hope. Do any of the files have NEF extensions or are they all JPG?

newtoboards

They are all in jpg but I may be able to retrieve the raw format. I'll check this evening, they were processed for me by camera owner so I'm not too sure whether or not they've kept the original. I'll check this evening. I would like to somehow improve them but if it's not possible then so be it.

dazftw

If you post up the photos someone on here will do it for you..

newtoboards

No just have jpegs no raw images

pixbyjohn

Try brightening them up in Picasa. Picasa is a free download. It might give you an acceptable result, worth a try.
http://picasa.google.com/

joeKel73

Less of this JPEG bashing from the palace of RAW... you can still bring out the shadows in a jpeg, just not to the same extent as raw but I'd say you'll be surprised. Through up a photo and we'll have a go...

Heebie

There are a raft of factors relating to shadow detail, the JPG file format, and digital photography in general, that can severely limit the amount recoverable from an underexposure.

Jpeg compression will take adjacent pixels that are "near" to being the same colour, calculate the average of them, and encode them as "this block of dots are all of colour <average>" instead of recording each pixel's color values separately. (It's how jpeg compression works.) This can take almost all shadow detail out of an underexposed image that is saved as a JPG very quickly.

In a RAW format, you will not have compression-loss in the shadow detail. Most dSLR cameras today will have either 12-bit per channel per pixel (36-bit) or 14-bit per channel per pixel (42-bit) dataset to play with. This means that the fine detail is MUCH more available. 24-bit color can only express gray (ranging from black to white) in 256 shades. (2 raised to the 8th power) 36-bit color is 4-bits per channel deeper, being able to encode 2048 shades of gray between black & white. 42-bit goes to 8192 shades in the same space.
JPG format is one of the following: 8-bit greyscale (256 shades of gray), 18-bit palletized to 8-bits (256 colour palette chosen from an 18-bit color space [256 of 262,144]) , or 24-bit colour (@ 16 million colors)
Your camera probably shoots in: 36-bit @ 16 billion colours or 42-bit @ 1 trillion colours. To put those numbers in some perspective.. the human eye is considered to be able to discern about 10 million possible shades.. so 36 & 42-bit colour give you insane amounts of data to manipulate.. so from a RAW format.. you can REALLY tweak your colour & exposure

Now.. if your shadow detail takes up 10% of the overall range of the photo, then an uncompressed JPG (that's at 100% quality, and not a JPG2 mind you, but a JPG) has to represent your shadow detail in only 26 shades, where a RAW file may have 201 or even 800+ shades of gray with which to represent that detail.

If you've got an underexposure of 2 stops, your shadow detail then is going to have to come from 6-7 shades of a 24-bit image, whereas you'll still have 50 shades at 36-bit and 200 shades at 42-bit. (In a compressed JPG, the values of 6-7 shades are almost guaranteed to be lumped together and become all the same, as well.)

As someone else mentioned.. if the exposure clipped (put any of the shadow detail below the perceptive threshold of the camera for the aperture/shutter/iso combination used).. those sections will all just be the blackest black available with no detail in them to recover.

At those kinds of exposure levels, there is also bound to be a lot of "noise" inherent in the image sensor to muck up the shadow detail further.

With exposures like that.. it sure would be nice to have your own darkroom. =D With film.. there's generally going to be data there.. and there are ways to get at it. With digital.. no so much. This particular issue really illustrates one of the worst shortcomings of the digital format, and outlines why I highly encourage people to get enormous memory cards and shoot in RAW as much as possible. (as well as using the deepest bit-depth their manipulation software can manage while editing images, and using Kodak ProPhoto color space for editing.. and only converting images to a color space like sRGB when you're exporting an image for the web or print.. although advanced colour management probably doesn't need to be mentioned here.)

I will definitely choose to bash the *£$£)(*!&()*!£! out of the jpg format in general. (although.. I do carry a decent point & shoot camera that only save JPG.. so call me a silly bollix if you want!) It's just fine for most people's holiday snapshots.. but if you want be able to "make art" from your shots.. shoot in RAW... and share the results!

foto joe wrote: »

Less of this JPEG bashing from the palace of RAW... you can still bring out the shadows in a jpeg, just not to the same extent as raw but I'd say you'll be surprised. Through up a photo and we'll have a go...

newtoboards

Right here's one of the images.

gandalf

Ok hope you don't mind but had a play with it quickly in Photoshop. Converted it to B&W, upped the brightness by around 20% and then played with curves and reduced the noise a bit as well.

Not sure if this is something that would do or not but you can brighten them a bit alright.

newtoboards

yeah that works! Much better than what it was for sure. I would be gutted if some of these were irretrievable as they're the only pictures we have of guests at our wedding. I've learned my lesson with this and don't ever get "budding photographers" in your family to take pictures you really want. You can't get cross when they do a bad job!!! Should have held onto the photographer for the night.

gandalf

At a couple of family get togethers with the in-laws I have set the camera to shutter priority and upped the ISO to the top it can go to (1600) and let my niece or nephew snap away. Sure sometimes the focus is out but if they watch what they are doing then they do get some good shots.

You should be able to clean that shot up more and have it brighter, I tend to like dark finishes and only spent a minute on it. I also have a B&W fetish.

newtoboards

I borrowed the camera and gave it to her so she wasn't really used to what she was given and I wasn't used to it either. Should have stuck to the camera she liked You've given me hope and I love what you've done so I know what my afternoon is going to be. I like black and white too weirdly, there's an honesty to the shot that the subject is the focus and not the background colours.

Heebie

Here's a color, a B&W and a sepiatone. I was trying to bring out as much detail in the image as I could. I really like how contrasty the one above is.. but I'm also kind of a detail freak.

I converted it to 16-bit per channel (48-bit) and worked with in Kodak ProPhoto color-space.

The color version was a single adjustment layer away (curves)

The black & white added a channel mixer layer, and a second curves layer.

The sepiatone effect was done with a hue/saturation layer set to colorise with hue at 15, saturation at 15.

The finished .PSD file is 51MB, so I didn't post it.

Diabhal_Glas

Hi Lads and Lasses,

5 min quickie fix in CS3

Used the Screen Blend mode with masking
Noise Ninja (plugin) with masking
A bit of smart sharpening with masking.

I suppose Id put more effort into the Noise reduction & Sharpening If I was to spend more time at it.


"NewtoBoards" thatll be some gas name when you have 1000+ posts