Image Rescue

Even the simplest of shots can benefit from some tweaking…

Photographed on a very sunny day, this flying seagull image has been overexposed because of the amount of light striking the lens. This means that the bright blue sky behind has lost its intensity, and we have some blown highlights around the bird’s bright white feathers. But because it was taken in raw, we might be able to pull some detail back into the feathers and rescue this image.

In either Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw’s Basic panel (these two Adobe programs essentially have the same editing tools), we can pull the Highlights and Whites Sliders to the left until we have those highlights under control. 1 There might still be a little brightness on the head, but as long as it is within the range of the Histogram we’ll be OK.

We can also tweak the Exposure slider to darken the blue sky. The downside of doing this is that it adjusts the exposure across the whole of the image, which means the underside of the wings will be now be too dark; but with an Adjustment Brush applied to these areas, we can lighten them using the Blacks and Shadows sliders. 2

We still want to increase the blue of the sky, so in the HSL panel with Saturation selected, we can take the target and click on the blue of the sky so that it just selects that colour channel. Now we’ll increase Saturation slightly before switching to Luminance and darkening the blues to create more of a contrast between bird and sky. 3

Finally, we are going to the Transform panel, where we can select the Rotate slider and take it to the right to tip the wings down for a more dynamic angle

– a subtle but important detail. 4