Sometimes I have a colorful item in the photo with highlights so bright that color is lost. I’m not confident of my approach in those situations. In the example below, I used luminosity masks to target the lighter values, then applied more color.
But I wonder if there is a better approach? Something not yet found?
I’d rather ‘underexpose’ a bit to keep that color, then use the tone curve in post to lift the rest of the image. I’m a ‘global’ guy; I used to mess with masks but it’s easy to make an abstract image if you’re not light on the application of whatever to the masked areas.
@ggbutcher’s advise is on point, but I just want to add 2 points to that.
Looking at the provided image, I’m all but sure that the flower has at least one (blue) blown channel. I specifically mention this because you tagged this topic with the gimp tag. GIMP is not a RAW editor but a pixel editor and not good for initial reconstruction. For reconstruction I would use RawTherapee or darktable to tackle the RAW. You can then pull the image into GIMP, if you prefer that editor, and do some more work on the damaged area(s) if needed.
When the outside conditions are rather bright and sunny, flowers (and other very colourful objects) are rather hard to photograph. Even if you underexpose you end up with very bright (=less colourful) flowers compared to the rest of the image.
If you plan on shooting, say, flowers do so on a (lightly) overcast day (=diffuse light). For me “perfect” would be if I hold my hand between thigh and sky, about 25-30cm away from my thigh and it casts a nice soft shadow. This way detail, contrast and colour are preserved. This starting point also makes it easier to manipulate it later on in GIMP (or a RAW editor) without making it look somewhat unnatural.
All this goes out of the window if you are just walking about and run into something nice and colourful to shoot, though. Glenn’s advise is your best bet in this case.
Excellent advice above.
But if you get desperate to recover an image, a very selective luminosity mask may help.
I have a GIMP plug-in which divides the luminosity into 10 equal, masked layers. It is rarely useful and very slow to run on large images!
For sunny days, polarizing filters are a good option.
Yes, no. Maybe?
Polarizing filters have a tendency to saturate colours, especially blues and to a somewhat lesser extent greens.
So, in general: Yes it can be rather useful on a sunny day, but it can also hurt the colour integrity/correctness of certain objects in your image (that would be the ‘no’). Also be careful when there is a sky in your image, an ugly blue gradient is easily created (the ‘maybe’).
Personally I rather not use a polarizing filter. I do have to sometimes to get rid of glare/reflections, but am acutely aware of the side-effects when using one.
Well, I’ve been using RawTherapee for RAW to TIF, so I’ve got what I need for both of these suggestions. Thank you folks!
