Image Rescue

Camera Raw helps us save this underexposed scene

Our ‘action’ dog diving into the North Sea just before sunset is a little underexposed! In fact, it’s almost silhouetted, and it would be great to see a little bit of the fur detail.

First, let’s deal with the composition 1 . There’s a slight lean to the horizon, and we could crop in a bit. We’ll do this in Geometry with Rotate, then push in on Scale to tighten it up.

Now we can just select the dog 2 via Masking and Select Subject, lifting the Shadows

slider by +45 to bring out enough detail and avoid introducing unwanted noise. The sky looks washed out 3 so, back in Masking, let’s use Select Sky, then make it a little richer by taking the Exposure slider to -50.

Finally, in the Basic Tab we can do a global Clarity boost just to make sure the whole image is a bit crisper 4 . It’ll darken the dog’s fur slightly, but earlier we lightened it enough to allow for this.