Does anyone know how this happened and how to avoid it in the future?

[Diana1979]

I took this picture of my daughters and for some reason my oldest daughter is dark in the picture, while my youngest is light. I tried to fix it later and I couldn't lighten my oldest without making my youngest too light. I'm wondering why it happened this way and how to avoid it in the future.

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[Nicole]

Hi Diana-
Is there any chance you can post the settings that you used when you took the shot? Maybe tell us a little bit more about the lighting in the room, if you used a flash, etc?

[hpebley3]

Originally Posted by Diana1979

I took this picture of my daughters and for some reason my oldest daughter is dark in the picture, while my youngest is light. I tried to fix it later and I couldn't lighten my oldest without making my youngest too light. I'm wondering why it happened this way and how to avoid it in the future.

It appears to me that the light is coming from above and to the left of camera, directly above or slightly behind their faces. The baby is looking up and to the left, so its face is in light, whereas the child is looking down and to the right, putting her face in the shadow of her own head.

A couple ways come to mind as to how this could have been avoided: 1) put a reflector (or second light source) down and to the right of them to put light into the child's face, 2) move the light source so it's in front of their faces rather than directly above and/or behind keeping the child's head from casting a shadow, 3) have the child turn to look into the light.

All that said, I think there's still some adjustments which could be done to help salvage the existing shot. In your before/after adjustments, it looks like just brightness/contrast was all that was adjusted. If so, this applies the same changes across the entire picture. What needs to happen is some selective changes, either in the tonal ranges changed or in the area of the picture or both. In other words, change just some of the colors but not all or make changes to just some of the picture but not all, or a combination of some colors for some of the picture. How this is done varies depending on what software package is used. As an example, I've taken the liberty to make a few tonal adjustments to show what this can do.


Hope this helps.
Harley Pebley

[klew]

I agree with hpebly3 on the source of the light. When using the autofocus settings on my camera, my results seem to indicate that the camera uses the brightest object in the view as the "standard" and everything else is relative to that object. The laziest solution I found when retaking the photo is to let the camera autofocus on a part of the room/scenery with uniform lighting (no lamps, reflections, etc.), then aim the camera back on the subjects before snapping.