major photo correction

i have some pics that were taken at an outside picnic. the sky behind the subjects is almost white, but they are in really deep shadow. When i fix the subjects the rest of the photo is really bad. I've made some headway with adjustemnt layers and masks, but is there anything else i could be doing? PLEASE HELP!

yeaa Sacramento! my dad lives there. im in Maryland, though
yey for my first post too, hi everyone.

do you have a sample of the photo? that would be helpful. it seems you need to mask out the sky, and just adjust levels on the rest. that should work well, assuming the subjects arent too dark. otherwise there will not be any information to extract.

this is the pic. there are a few more that have a lesser degree of the same problem.

Here

Again, any help is really appreciated.

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You can try playing around with the Brightness/Contrast settings (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast), or you can scour the net for photo retouch tutorials - someone eventually might post links to them.

But you should still buy a cheap Photography book and especially read about optics. Since the sun's going into the lens, it'll screw up the internal light meter and automatically (assuming you're in Program mode) kicks down the fstop and/or raises shutter speed, meaning less light comes in and darker subjects.

The technique you are looking for is called "fill flash".

A quick and dirty demonstration of it would be to duplicate the layer and set the blending mode to screen - obviously the fill flash technique is a little more comprehensive, but this will give you the idea.

penguin_rule - since the image is taken with people standing in the shadow, and the sun is shining through some leaves into the camera, lightning up the image too much will make it look wrong, so watch out for that.

I made some quick corrections http://www.pixelchick.dk/billeder/broken_pic.jpg - now there's more light on the people and more color on their skin and clothes.

You probably want to know what I did, but that's kinda difficult to explain without making a full tutorial about it ;)
But explained quickly:

Dublicated the layer and set the blending mode to screen
Added curves, levels and selective color adjusment layers
Painted a bit white over their faces and changed the blending mode to overlay and the opacity to a really small number
Removed some dust and scratches with the clone stamp tool
Added a bit of Smart Blur to get rid of the rest of the dust.

Pixel Chick is right on. You might want to do only about 90% opacity on the first duplicated layer with the screen mode. Also, I (very roughly for my example) did a selection around the people and deleted the background from this duplicated layer. I then flattened the image and adjusted levels, b & c, and fiddled around a bit before doing any other touch ups.

http://www.pictusdesign.com/teamps/brokenpic.jpg

thx, very helpful everyone.

just for the record i didnt take the pic... so all the shooting advice is preaching to the choir :-P. my grandma took the pic, and a bunch more like them, and i'm trying to be helpful

i actualy know a lot about color correction with curves and the painting white trick. i just cant seem to salvage any more detail from the background. all the advice has been really cool though.

thx a lot :-D