blown out hair

[evphoto]

Was wondering if anyone could help me figure out how to fix the blown out section of this little boys hair? We took most of the pictures in the shade but as he was getting ready to run back to mom I snapped this cute picture of him. Any pointers on how to do it or a link to a tutorial on how to do it would be great. I use photoshop cs4 thanks

[PrimeTime]

It looks pretty blown out to me, but if there is any information left and you shot it in RAW.............. Make two copys of the raw image................one with the exposure set for the whole picture and one with the exposure lowered all the way to get as much detail in the boy's hair as you can. Use the first copy (exposure set for whole picture) as the base copy. Use the second one as a layer. Add a layer mask set to black. Select the paint brush and set the flow to around 20% and color white. Brush in over the blown out area and the lower exposed hair will show through. When you're done, add a 3 pix. blur to the mask to help blend it in and adjust the opacity to you're liking.

[edbayani]

if you shot this in JPEG, then you can still 'reconstruct' the white areas by selecting the white with the magic wand, this will select almost all the whites but you should do this section by section. press Q to enter quickmask and with the brush paint the quick mask with white to erase the other portions to leave just a small section.press Q again to exit quickmask and move the selection to the portion where there is hair. press ctrl J to move the selected area to another layer. move this selection to cover the white area and adjust with levels, hue and saturation, to make it blend with the surrounding hair. fine tune this with dodge and burn. do this in other areas. you will need the plug in 'patience' for this.
you can also increase the height of the canvas so you can use the clone tool to add the cropped portion of the head and to copy the bg.
attached sample. hope this helps.