Need Processing Help

Here's an image of Elakala Falls, in Blackwater Falls State Park, West Virginia. It in a gorge, so there's a tremendous amount of contrast if the sun is shining. I've got a series of images with slow, medium, and fast shutter speeds. However, only the medium shutter offers a chance at double processing the image so that there is detail in both the dark areas and in the water. However, when I try to double process, I end up with strange gray to white gradations in the falling water. For those who are more experienced than me (and I'm a beginner at sophisticated processing) is it possible to save this picture via a double processing approach? If so, what methods might work?

Thanks,
Mark

Mark - Try a trial of Viveza - I bet it can salvage some or even most of the dark and the light areas.
Good luck -
Sandy

No need to spend extra $$ on software when this can be fixed with PS.
You have several choices.The simplest was using the Shadow/Highlight tool in PS which resulted in the fix above.
Note that S/H cannot recover information lost in the overexposed sections of water.
If you shot this in RAW, then you can recover much of the overexposed highlights in the water using the Recovery slider.

John, your processing looks pretty good. However, it looks like the water highlights are still burned out. If I shift the exposure in LR by about 2 stops, they look good, but the darks are way black. I'm trying to get both unburned out highlights and slight detail in the darks. To some extent, it's a matter of taste and personal style and I'm still working on those two.

"However, it looks like the water highlights are still burned out.

See the last two sentences in my previous post.
You can't fix the blown out highlights globally for the reasons you stated. You'll either have to recover them in the RAW processor or blend in an image where they're not overexposed.

John, In the RAW file of the posted image, the highlights can be recovered, but it takes reducing the exposure by 2 stops. At that point, there's no help for the dark areas. That's why I tried double processing, one version adjusted for the normal and dark areas and a second one without the burned out highlights. However, I'm not able to combine them in PS and get a reasonable result. To me it seems that there's something in the blending that I'm missing. I've tried masking the dark version so that only the highlights blend using TK's masking approach but that leave gray areas in the mask that show up as gray in blended image.

Mark, Have you tried a combination of reduced exposure/highlight recovery/fill light in Lightroom? Admittedly that may give you a fairly flat looking image but you can then play with contrast in Lightroom or in Photoshop using the curves dialog. If you are recovering highlights by reducing exposure it sounds like the original is a RAW file. You wouldn't recover highlight detail from a JPG. The highlights would just go grey.

Mark,

Take a look at Tony Kuyper's Luminosity Masks. You can use the steps in Tony's tutorials to build the luminosity masks. It will take some time, but it's a great way to learn how they work. His tutorials are excellent. You can purchase the PS actions that build the luminosity masks for you at a very reasonable cost. Highly recommended!

--P

Hi Mark, if you are using TK's masks and believe the problem is the blend and you're getting gray areas, chances are the mask is not completely white in the waterfall section, and you're blending a combination of both exposures. It sounds like you may need to play with the masking. However, it is always going to be a difficult job to mask in with such a high contrast scene. Perhaps try processing for the waterfall only and use that as your base exposure, then create another exposure for the the rest of the scene and paint that in manually with the brush. I did a quick job with this method and posted the result above. These types of scenes are generally better shot in low contrast light to avoid these types of problems. All the best with it.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I tried Jim's suggestion and it does work. It just makes me nervous to make such extreme adjustments. Exposure -2, Recovery 81, and Fill Light 50. I also downloaded Vivenza and it gives similar results to the LR approach. I'll work more on masking over the next few days. It also seems that it's hard to know when a highlight in blown if it's a white highlight...it seems that the only reliable way is to look for details and if there aren't any, then it's probably blown.

"It also seems that it's hard to know when a highlight in blown if it's a white highlight...it seems that the only reliable way is to look for details and if there aren't any, then it's probably blown."

Actually, the histogram in both your camera and your image editor will let you know right away whether you have grossly under and overexposed images. Learning to use the histogram both in the field and while 'developing' your work is one of the greatest advantages of digital photography, IMO. See this tutorial for details.

Mark, You had extreme light to deal with. That often does require extreme editing measures of one sort or another. Keep in mind too that in brightly lit scenes like that some blown highlights are okay as well as some lost shadow detail. Specular highlights, for example, should always be blown because they are too bright even for your eye. Pushing the two extremes totally into gamut can end up looking unnatural and surreal. The trick is to find a point where you get "enough" highlight and shadow detail to feel right. Ideally, if your objective is detail throughout, would be to shoot the scene on an overcast day but then you'd have a very different mood to the picture.

It just makes me nervous to make such extreme adjustments.

Why? You can't hurt anything - it's just 1's and 0's and you've always got your RAW file. And if it looks how you want it to look at the size you want, then go for it!

Personally, I'd probably try an HDR approach as well - creating three or four "exposures" by processing one of more of the RAW files and throwing them at PS's HDR function, or SNS-HDR (or maybe one of the other pieces of HDR software like Photomatix, but they can get pretty complicated with tons of options and I don't own them). That's not an option in LR, but if you wind up with a lot of shots like this might be worth looking into. I'd be happy to give it a shot if you want to send me the RAW file. I don't know that anything will come out of it, but it's worth a try I think.

And as always, there's not a real substitute sometimes for visiting the waterfall when there's simply less contrasty light.