How to brighten upper or lower half of an image in affinity photo ?

[Sathy]

Hello,

I took a photo on a friends event with bounce flash bouncing up to the ceiling. The photo got screwed up with the top half of the photo exposed to flash while the bottom half is full dark, Can someone help me recover this and suggest how I can adjust the flash to be even throughout the photo ? I have the raw file for the same, but do not know how to fix this

[GarryP]

One quick-and-dirty method could be to add an Exposure Adjustment to the image, then draw a Gradient Fill on the adjustment layer and adjust the gradient and exposure levels to suit – see attached video.

Note that this is a very quick adjustment and probably isn’t good enough for images you want to print and display.

I’m sure that one (or more) of the experts will come up with a better technique.

[jeffers]

That looks pretty good to me

[carl123]

5 hours ago, Sathy said:

The photo got screwed up with the top half of the photo exposed to flash while the bottom half is full dark,

Did you upload the right image because I can't see anything seriously wrong with that image, - other than the unicorn(?) in front of the boy.

Personally, I would just concentrate on getting rid of that (e.g. inpainting, cloning etc)

[RichardMH]

Other quick and dirty method is to add a (white) fill layer, change blend mode to Soft Light then put a gradient on that (white at the bottom). Can  make the fill layer gray rather than white to modify the effect.

[Sathy]

7 hours ago, carl123 said:

Did you upload the right image because I can't see anything seriously wrong with that image, - other than the unicorn(?) in front of the boy.

Personally, I would just concentrate on getting rid of that (e.g. inpainting, cloning etc)

Yes its the right picture, and do you notice that top of the image is over exposed and the lower part of the image is underexposed ? The exposure is not even in the picture and i am not sure what causes this. I feel like the bounce flash had a direct flash on the adults face make it a harsh flash and the kids a soft flash.

However I see your point on the unicorn and see if I can get it out

[Sathy]

9 hours ago, GarryP said:

One quick-and-dirty method could be to add an Exposure Adjustment to the image, then draw a Gradient Fill on the adjustment layer and adjust the gradient and exposure levels to suit – see attached video.

Note that this is a very quick adjustment and probably isn’t good enough for images you want to print and display.

I’m sure that one (or more) of the experts will come up with a better technique.

Thank you Garry, this atleast helps me recovers the photo for now... I wish if there are any more ways to adjust this without losing much of picture quality.. I do have a RAW file, but I dont see much options in the RAW develop persona, is there anything I can do there similar to this ? that will have a better result ?

[GarryP]

13 hours ago, Sathy said:

I do have a RAW file, but I dont see much options in the RAW develop persona, is there anything I can do there similar to this ?

I don’t use RAW images and I’ve never done any RAW developing so I can’t help with that but I’m sure someone else will be able to do so.

[v_kyr]

On 9/13/2022 at 6:11 AM, Sathy said:

I took a photo on a friends event with bounce flash bouncing up to the ceiling. The photo got screwed up with the top half of the photo exposed to flash while the bottom half is full dark ...

Well the flash light distribution angle you've used for bouncing up to the ceiling effected this. So the top image section got too much reflecting light than the bottom part here. Next time you better try to use some on flash diffusor/modifier which does distribute the light more evenly also to the front than bouncing harsh flash light from the ceiling.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Next time you better try to use some on flash diffusor/modifier which does distribute the light more evenly also to the front than bouncing harsh flash light from the ceiling.

Back in ancient times when I was experimenting with bounce flash lighting, I just used a piece of white card stock folded into sort of a fan shape & held in place behind the flash head with a rubber band to reflect some of the light forward that otherwise would have reflected off ceiling. Worked fairly well & easy to create on the spot from any whitish paper lying around & the rubber bands I always kept a few of in my camera bag.

[Lisbon]

Hi @Sathy

On 9/13/2022 at 5:11 AM, Sathy said:

The photo got screwed up with the top half of the photo exposed to flash while the bottom half is full dark

Sometimes I use a technique to even out the brightness in a photo. The lighter parts will become darker and vice versa.

You need to make a copy of the background (Ctrl+J).
This copy must be:
- Desaturated (Edit > Fill > Custom colour: White / Blend mode: Colour)
- Inverted (Ctrl+I)
- Set to Overlay blend mode

At this point the image will look awful but if you add a Gaussian blur with high radius (200px - you will need to type the number), it will look like this:

[R C-R]

44 minutes ago, Lisbon said:

You need to make a copy of the background (Ctrl+J).
This copy must be:
- Desaturated (Edit > Fill > Custom colour: White / Blend mode: Colour)
- Inverted (Ctrl+I)
- Set to Overlay blend mode

At this point the image will look awful but if you add a Gaussian blur with high radius (200px - you will need to type the number), it will look like this:

That works really well, at least on this image, so I thought it would be useful to make a macro to make that easier to do. It worked OK if for the last step I used the live Gaussian blur so it remained editable at the expense of one extra step during the macro to accept the 200 px blur. Alternately, using the regular destructive Gaussian blur avoided the need to accept the preset 200 px blur, but since it is destructive does not allow the blur to be changed later.

Since both versions might be useful for different images, both are attached below. Hopefully they will be of some use to a few users....

adjustable fix brightness.afmacro

one step fix brightness.afmacro

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Back in ancient times when I was experimenting with bounce flash lighting,

Friend gave me a piece of excellent, hard earned, advice, "Don't bounce the flash off the ceiling when you are using your TLR. You'll go blind."  Only in my right eye... He was a practitioner of your solution.

[Ron P.]

Modern Digital Cameras/Flashes are different. I've bounced flash, off ceilings, and walls numerous times. Most of the modern flashes have a nice little "card" tucked into them, just behind the top of the flash head. Pull it out, to through some light straight ahead. If not, the rubber banded 3x5 card, or just holding a business card up does the same.

I learned about using a black foamy thing, from Neil van Niekerk. Used one for some time. Works great..

 

[Lisbon]

59 minutes ago, R C-R said:

That works really well, at least on this image...

Great point @R C-R

This technique does not work in all situations. It's just one more technique to add to our arsenal.

Since it is very subtle it produces very natural results. But in extreme cases of over/under exposure, since it is so subtle, we cannot expect miracles with this technique. In such cases, a more aggressive approach would be required.

The strength of this technique is, at the same time, its weakness.

[R C-R]

47 minutes ago, Ron P. said:

Most of the modern flashes have a nice little "card" tucked into them, just behind the top of the flash head.

I once had an old Vivitar(?) flash with a small forward facing flash in the body below a separate  flash head that could be pivoted both up and to the left or right, so it could bounce light off a wall or ceiling & still provide a little forward facing fill flash.

[Ron P.]

My EOS 70D has a little flip-up flash, and the flash hotshoe. Currently have a few Yongnuo flash, and a good off-camera flash setup. I can set up my Youngnuos, with whatever modifiers I need, and control them from the remote TX on my camera. They can be a little time consuming to setup, and you don't really want to use them if you have much wind outdoors. However they allow for grabbing some great images. Way better then the flat images with on camera flash...

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Ron P. said:

They can be a little time consuming to setup...

That is what I liked about the old Vivitar flash -- it took only a second or so to aim the main flash & the smaller one always fired, so there was essentially no setup time. It even had a telephoto feature built into the main flash so by pulling outward on it the flash beam narrowed. The only thing I did not like about it was it was fairly bulky & it took ten plus seconds to recharge.

[Sathy]

On 9/14/2022 at 8:23 AM, R C-R said:

That works really well, at least on this image, so I thought it would be useful to make a macro to make that easier to do. It worked OK if for the last step I used the live Gaussian blur so it remained editable at the expense of one extra step during the macro to accept the 200 px blur. Alternately, using the regular destructive Gaussian blur avoided the need to accept the preset 200 px blur, but since it is destructive does not allow the blur to be changed later.

Since both versions might be useful for different images, both are attached below. Hopefully they will be of some use to a few users....

adjustable fix brightness.afmacro 1.43 kB · 1 download

one step fix brightness.afmacro 964 B · 1 download

Thanks a lot, i was able to fix it with a gradient overlay in the raw file, and adjust the exposure on that layer. This is a method I never knew until GarryP taught me. But with this 1 pic, I feel I got to a learn a little more about the areas of the tool I never used before, Thanks to everyone for the tips and suggestions.

I like these macros, this would make things much faster, I will also try to learn on how to create macros for some of the common needs I have,

 

Thank you very much everyone. Sorry, I had to ship my laptop to service and took a few days to get back and set everything up, and reply to the post

 

On 9/13/2022 at 1:34 AM, GarryP said:

One quick-and-dirty method could be to add an Exposure Adjustment to the image, then draw a Gradient Fill on the adjustment layer and adjust the gradient and exposure levels to suit – see attached video.

Note that this is a very quick adjustment and probably isn’t good enough for images you want to print and display.

I’m sure that one (or more) of the experts will come up with a better technique.