Adjusting brightness to one area

[FallsCity]

Greetings - I have a question that I am hoping someone can help me with. Actually, I am trying to help someone else out with an issue that I sometimes encounter myself.

As you can see on the attached photo there is an area that is way too bright. Adjusting the brightness and contrast of the photo would lighten and darken the entire photo.

I think what needs to be done is to isolate just that bright white area and darken it a few shades.

I am by no means a photoshop guru, but this seems like something that could be done with ease if I just new the correct techniques. A simple step-by-step in Photoshop or Lightroom would be great. Thanks in advance!

[RecurrentNerve]

The problem you have here is that even though it is a relatively simple task to select the area in question to adjust seperately, there's nothing to work with - it's 'blown', i.e. so overexposed in that area there's no detail in it. It would just be an empty grey area as opposed to an empty white area. Personally I think it would be better as it is!

If you do want to try adjusting, you need to select the area in question. In Ps, this would involve using the Polyganol Lasso tool or the Magic Wand selector. The lasso lets you click to select an area - it's pretty obvious how it works once you start. The Magic Wand selects similar pixels so is good for areas with fairly uniform colouring like this. Simply select the tool and click in the area. Adjust the 'Tolerance' setting to fine-tune. There are thousands of tutorials on selecting in Ps online, Google away.

[zona5101]

in lightroom you would grab the adjustment brush and set it to exposure. lower the exposure value and paint where you want to darken...but as pointed out, if there is nothing there (blown out) there will be nothing to bring back.

[Japaslavian]

As pointed out, you won't be able to simply darken a blow-out area, but there is a way to add density to that section.
Firstly, choose a light gray that is roughly the shade you want to fill that area with.
Once you have that color, create a new layer in and fill the entire layer with that gray.
Next, change the blend mode of your gray layer to multiply. This will fill any completely white areas with that gray, but it will also slightly darken everything else. You will want to make a mask on this gray layer to remove the darkening affect on the other parts of the image. You will want to use a soft brush and hit all the obvious spots, like the lower section and the left side. I wouldn't advise you to lasso/pen tool out just the spot you wanted originally because it will be really obvious what you did. Just sort've feather out the gray. I would probably add just a little bit of monochromatic noise as well.

That should do the trick, but it will take some playing to make it look natural.

I spent a couple minutes doing what I just described, and this was the outcome:



I assume that's what you're going for.
It's probably better to just leave it blown-out, but if you so choose...

[ravncat]

was it shot in jpg or raw?

In raw, there might be some data in the highlights - drop your brightness and your exposure and up your fill light and play with the tone curves, with a slight blackpoint adjustment. That should let you get there - provided there is data in the highlights to workwith

in photoshop you can try shadow hilight -but if that is a jpg image, you`re not going to be able to get as far with it.

[FallsCity]

Thanks everyone, this has all been really helpful...
The thing that I did that probably helped the most was loading it into Lightroom, choosing Tone Curves and bringing the top field "Highlights" ALL the way down..then slight adjustments to the Lights and Darks...

But its a good point that someone made is that sometimes, it is overexposed too much and there is only so many adjustments you can do.