Comparison, trying to fix blown out background

[NicoleScraps]

I was taking some photos of my kids yesterday and as you can see, the background is a little blown out. We were behind the house in the late afternoon and the sun was in front of the house. The spot where they were sitting was shaded, but as you can probably tell, past the edge where the shadow from the house stopped, it was pretty bright.
Next time, I will probably avoid this by just waiting a while longer for the sun to set further, but in the meantime, I have been trying to fix this one up a bit.



I used the lasso tool with a feather and selected around all the background (I need to go in and do a more detailed selection, this was very rough to see if it would work). I duplicated just the background selection, set the blending mode to multiply and reduced the opacity to maybe 50%.



Does this work at all for you or does it look too processed? Another question, if I had shot this in RAW instead of jpg, would this process have been easier? Or would I still have to isolate the background somehow to change the exposure?

[kristenh]

it doesn't look too processed from my end. i love the way you have them posed and am SOO impressed that you got 4 kids to look good all at the same time. i can't even do it with 2!

have you considered just cropping it really tight? just taking out the legs of the two bigger kids...

also, you didn't post your exif data, but it may be that if you had used a wider aperture, the background would have blurred better and would have been less distracting. also, this is probably heresy, but you could maybe have used your flash to brighten the kids faces a bit relative to their background.