OT Anybody got underexposed digital photos?

[Peter]

>  1) It's painful tracing around a complex shape that you want to mask.
>
>  2) It works OK if you have consistently bright and consistently dark
>     areas.  Try doing it with a picture with gradients or multiple
>     areas with multiple in-between levels of brightness.
>
>  3) Unless you're really good, the process leaves ugly artifacts that
>     make the editing obvious.

Imho you have to differentiate between various types of overexposure / 
underexposure. An unaided program cannot succeed here. The most often 
encountered cases are the 'janus face effect' (portrait sidelit), then 
flashlit object against dark background, and the others can usually be 
defined as variations on this theme.

Ime, sometimes the 'recovery' consists in blotting out completely the 
underexposed area, leaving a slighltly corrected picture of the main 
subject floating on black (can be colored or 'bluescreened' to great 
effect).

In the case of the janus face effect complete recovery is not possible.

FYI most better editing programs (including gimp) allow an alpha 
gradient image to be convolved with the defective image. By picking the 
gradient direction(s) right one can obtain some equalization of uneven 
lighting.

Peter
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