9 Years Ago

A Cloudy Solution

Because I couldn't find much online, I undertook a bit of experimenting and discovered a new (perhaps intended?) use for the 'Clouds' command

The top shot features over-exposed blown out clouds, and so it makes a (admittedly pretty average) shot unusable.

In the bottom correction, I selected all bits that were in the pure white range (done by adjusting the sensitivity of the magic wand to include the slightly off-whites as well).

Next to filter>render>clouds. Copy the result, undo it and the selection, then paste in place.

I increased contrast and added some noise,. how much is dependent on how much you feel like, but fifty to a hundred should do. This is to fill in the gaps a little.

I then Gaussian blurred a bit, and set the opacity to 30 percent, fiddling to get it to feel like a close blend.

Finally I sepia-toned it, and shifted hue to 180, and pushed saturation to 100 percent.

Violins and violas!

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Mike Savad

9 Years Ago

seems like a lot of work when you can just use selective color - whites - and drop it down to make it darker. or you can use levels, contrast, curves or anything else that adjusts whites. or you can do a highlight selection and then add gray or darken it from there.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Mark Blauhoefer

9 Years Ago

This is true.

But I periodically suffer a malfunction in my braincell that results in shooting out-of-focus landscapes in macro mode*, and fluorescent purple white balances instead of auto. Likewise I oftentimes find after the event that the camera had been set to jpg, with an incorrect EV applied

Like in this example photo, added to shooting into the sun, well, in those highlights there are no details to recover .

But there are many others too. Far too many. And having access to 'Clouds' and 'Difference Clouds' with no distinct purpose to them, I figured I'd try a few things in an endeavor to fix the unfixable. And it sort of worked.

I chose this as the process image because of the sheer amount of damage.

In future, time permitting, I'll try it out on other unfixables.

*No fix for this

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