Image Rescue

There’s a great deal to fix in this butterfly image

Butterflies are a brilliant subject throughout the summer months, but it’s not always easy grabbing a shot of an insect that’s so active when the sun is out. This photo also needs some compositional improvements, and is far too underexposed.

We’ll use Transform to change the composition but still retain resolution 1 . The Scale slider can be pushed up to 140 and we can move the image’s position using the Y-offset slider, so the stem comes out of the bottom right-hand corner.

The camera’s meter has been tricked into underexposing the image, so we need a +1.00 push on the Exposure slider in the Basics Panel so that lovely background starts to work 2 . We’ll take an Adjustment Brush and mask over the butterfly itself, then push the Texture slider to +30 to bring out the wing detail 3 .

We can boost the background further with +30 on the Yellow and Green Luminance sliders in the HSL Panel, then darken the colour on the flower with -50 on the Purple channel 4 . Now the shot has a new lease of life. An indifferent butterfly capture is now bursting with colour and offers plenty of detail.