Shadow master I took some people photos while on holiday. There is a lot of shadow across the faces. Is there anything I can do to improve the shots?
you photograph on bright sunny days, ugly and unwanted shadows frequently cause problems. At the time, you could avoid the issue by using a little flash, just to fill in the darker areas. If your camera has a built-in flash, then it’s perfect for this situation.
Since you were sensible enough to shoot raw-format files, there is a really easy fix that we can do to bring out the detail in the shadow areas and balance that exposure more. I had a hunt through some holiday pictures to find something similar to holiday shots, so hopefully the shot above of the Chilean guard will prove suitable to show what you can do with your images.
The key to sorting this out is only to affect the dark areas and not the light. A simple exposure tweak won’t do it, as that will brighten both the lighter and darker parts of your image, potentially causing the brightest areas to overexpose.
Both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom have a Shadows slider, which we can use to selectively bring out the details hidden in the shadows. Having tested the shadows slider in both Lightroom and ACR with the same images, I can confidently say there is little or no difference in terms of how they improve the image, so either software works equally well on this.
Even at +100 on the Shadows slider there is no detrimental effect on my raw image, although this amount of shadow lightening doesn’t necessarily look natural. For this shot, I would be inclined to leave Shadows at about +50, where there is still a clear shadow from the soldier’s cap but it has been reduced enough to allow us to see the hidden eye detail.
The clean, blurred background frames the meerkat standing on guard nicely. You’ve applied just the right