I went out for a photo shoot with DD. I'm still not very good at manual settings, though so I use my pre-programed settings. Anyway, the light was a little harsh when I got this photo...



Any ideas on what settings I can play with in my program to fix this photo and on my camera to avoid it in the future would be GREATLY appreciated!

I don't know which program you are using but in photoshop I duplicated the layer, changed the blend mode to multiply, then lowered the opacity to around 39%.

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Jodys
My Gallery
Thanks for looking

Brought into Lightroom... corrected white balance, clarity to 45, vibrance +1, modified curves in both shadow and blown highlights to bring back in range. Also added a small vignette to edges to highlight your daughter.

To avoid in future, you'll need to better control white balance.. here, the auto white balance overcompensated for the severe back light and dulled the image to avoid total blowout of highlights.. shooting RAW would have been easy to correct - I did ok with the jpg but of course the image resolution suffered a bit.

Great job Pesto! I will need to remember about white balance, too, since I frequently have to correct the images, when I could just avoid it in the first place... Thanks anyway

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Olga
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To be honest.. I typically just leave WB always set to auto as well knowing full well that I can completely control it via photoshop later on - many "true blue" photographers will write that you should control your WB in your camera and not do touchups later... but in this day and age and with the tools available like Lightroom and Photoshop - I say just fix it later.

Again.. another very important reason to shoot RAW (+ JPG if you want) - the flexibility allowed in after shooting modifications is much broader than shooting just jpg.

THANK YOU!!! I'll have to look through my manual and work on the WB

Welcome.. give it time and you'll do better - again, you might just want to be sure you take multiple photos of the same scene too... if you camera allows it, set it up for bracketing and set it to +/- 0.7 EV. Then, you will get 3 photos... 1 might be underexposed.. 1 might be overexposed and 1 might be ok.. you can then either use the best one and work on it from there or use software (or photoshop) to merge them together taking the best areas of each photo and masking out the bad areas to get one perfect image...

if no bracketing (because it is a P&S), just set the camera to manual and do the exposure settings yourself... easy and the best way to learn and understand how to get the results you'd like.. Good Luck!