Over exposure - can it be fixed?

David1 · October 28, 2021, 10:03am

I was photographing in horrible weather and forgot to change the exposure compensation when the sun came out so this is over exposed. It is a .cr3 file
Any ideas on how to fix it?

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

Thanks a lot in advance

apostel338 · October 28, 2021, 10:14am

First step: Upload file

David1 · October 28, 2021, 10:17am

IMG_4726.CR3 (26.8 MB)

David1 · October 28, 2021, 10:20am

Sorry about that. It is now uploaded

betazoid · October 28, 2021, 10:28am

I think this cannot be fixed.

heckflosse · October 28, 2021, 10:29am

Using RT: left with neutral profile, right with the processing you can see in history

apostel338 · October 28, 2021, 10:32am

No problem.

There doesn’t seem to be any useful information in most of the overexposed areas. Personally, I see little hope with normal methods.

heckflosse · October 28, 2021, 10:43am

That’s true. But there is at least some information which can be recovered to make it a tiny bit better

David1 · October 28, 2021, 10:43am

Thanks for that the two exposures in the history - where are they stored?

David1 · October 28, 2021, 10:44am

I didn’t expect a miracle but what you did, did help.

heckflosse · October 28, 2021, 10:46am

Have a look at the left red rectangle in my screenshot, which frames the RT processing steps to recover some information

David1 · October 28, 2021, 11:11am

Thanks I can’t find those steps in RT. I can find white point but not those two in the options I did look under them all. Sorry to be a bit slow.

apostel338 · October 28, 2021, 11:16am

It’s them.

Enabling HL-Reconstruct and changing the method (top of Exposure).

grafik

David1 · October 28, 2021, 12:07pm

Thank you I found it at last.

paulmatth · October 28, 2021, 12:07pm

Hello, this is what I get in Art using Tone Equalizer, Tone Curve and Log Tone Mapping. I’m afraid this is all, or nearly, you can recover.

David1 · October 28, 2021, 12:09pm

Thanks for that Paul could I have the processsing parameters so I can do that on my PC and add the label etc.

marter · October 28, 2021, 1:03pm

Hi,

here my try with RT dev:

over_exposure_IMG_4726.cr3.jpg.out.pp3 (18,3 KB)

David1 · October 28, 2021, 1:28pm

Thank you very good.

Jade_NL · October 28, 2021, 3:04pm

Bit of an even mix between RawTherapee and Krita.

MotoFotoe · November 3, 2021, 8:43am

As far as blow outs it could be worse, but yes the data is just gone in those hottest areas. I thought it cleaned up well enough in darktable though. If it was a photo of my child that I liked well enough it is very printable and plenty good for media sharing. I haven’t done any edits recently so felt a little rusty at 1st, but it was good to open up dt again. I had something I liked in a few minutes of experimenting, but I got carried away after 30 minutes.

Top photo in this screenshot here of dt is where I started from after import using dt’s scene-referred workflow:

Looks like a light snow had fallen and I’m making the guess the sky that day was probably grey, and the light possibly flat and even at least before the sun came out. I didn’t do much to the color of things like the field behind them since it would be just a guess on my part, but did use what I thought were the darker parts of the image (socks/shorts) to set the black point.

I thought it looked OK in B/W as well.

If anyone is curious I used a DT git build I compiled myself from this pkgbuild that includes cr3 support on the AUR: AUR (en) - darktable-cr3-git