Fixing overexposure

[aroberts]

I have a few shots that ended up with half or little pieces of the model's face/hair way too bright. What is the best way to fix this? (I am using GIMP)
Here is an example photo.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2669/...531e96f100.jpg

[OsmosisStudios]

That's blown right out: youre not getting it back.

[agresbach]

i think you could recover a LITTLE bit of it via a recovery slider (i'm not sure if GIMP has this) but the problem you're going to have is the rest of the face looks to be underexposed so you'd have to do quite a bit of work to adjust that and try to balance between the over and underexposed parts of the face. With the degree that it is, i'd agree its probably not very usable since the work would probably make the photo very noisey

EDIT: just did a very very quick edit to see how much could be done to salvage and its ultimately up to you if you determine if its usable for your purposes or not. Like I thought, theres just so much of the blown out area that you can correct so there still is going to be a portion thats like that, and i brushed over the underexposed area of the face to bump exposure up a little bit there too. like i said, very quick edit but you get the idea. I'm not familiar with GIMP so i'd be the wrong person to advise on replicating this kind of thing there but theres plenty of smart people on here that might be able to help