Brightening Photo's

[DQuaN]

Hi all,

Hope someone can help me.

Recently my parents had their 30th Wedding Anniversary. It was a great night with lots of people. There were tons of digital cameras floating about but Mum and Dad also bought a disposable camera to pass between tables.

They sent the camera off to get developed and got the photos back on a CD.

It seems that only I and a couple of other people bothered activating the flash before taking pics.

How difficult is it to use photoshop or something similar to brighten them up?

I'm guessing it's pretty hopeless as they'll just end up a brighter shade of dark!

Any help would be great.

 

[Speedster502]

Which version of Photoshop do you have? If you've got CS2 you should have a feature called "Shadow and Highlight", bring up the "Shadow" slider, it's not a brightness thing it'll just bring out some of the detail that has been lost due to the flash not firing. Then go to "Brightness and Contrast", pull up the brightness slider to around 0-35 depending on how dark the photos are, then pull the contrast slider up to around 10-15 which'll even out the white. Hope that helps, if you have any trouble feel free to contact me.

 

[DQuaN]

I don't have any version!

I was just wondering if it was possible!

 

[Speedster502]

I don't have any version!

I was just wondering if it was possible!

Oh! Yeah it's definitly possibly to revive most photos in Photoshop not matter what the condition, well atleast get them to a stage where you can actually view them as a photo rather than a black square!

 

[TB]

There is a pretty decent tutorial for Gimp here.

 

[boiltheocean]

There is a pretty decent tutorial for Gimp here.

Oh yeah GIMP is a good option.

 

[DQuaN]

Thanks, i'll give that a try.

In the tutorial it uses an example of one object (in this case the woman) being darker. Would it work if it was the whole photo?


*edit*
What is the bBrush Tool?

 

[Beerz]

Bear (bare?) in mind that, the darker the areas being brightened, the more noise they´ll have when you push them to show, so a good plugin for removing noise is a must. And even then, most of the time it won't have enough detail and colour information to ever become "printable" and "framable".

Sorry, can't help you out with GIMP, I'm still a CS2 user.

 

[nick09]

You should be able to use the gimp to brighten the photos. This tutorial here should help you and incase you got some red eye problems, this tutorial should help.