Under & Over Exposed - Where to start?

[Paul G]

Okay, so I have this image, an all-round bad shot, as an example.
Can someone step me through what you would do to attempt to rescue an image such as this with extremes of exposure?
This is the RAW shot, just resized and converted to JPG.

[MarkW]

Using something like photoshop you can brighten a shadow area, but once a portion of the image is over exposed then that part is generally considered as ruined.

Expose for the brightest part of the image.

[ricktas]

You are going to be hard pushed to fix this well due to the very over-exposed area. Unfortunately digital camera sensors are not good at holding detail in over-exposed areas and you might have to deal with that in this one. Shadow areas are not as much of an issue.

I reckon you should try and bring the shadow areas up a bit, using highlight/shadows adjustments, and then seriously consider a conversion to an mono photo for the final version. However, it is going to be very hard work to get this to appear good, don't expect to get to great.

[Big Pix]

Open the image in ACR.... Photoshop CS3-4....... adjust exposure for the light areas, darken, then add fill light which will lighten the dark areas.......

[elgoogoogle]

i reckon there is a crop here.

[Paul G]

Ummm.......No.
Was looking for constructive feedback on this one to help the learning process

[David]

Mate I cant help with post processing at this extreme: attempts to save the overexposed section might ruin it.. it looks like one of those shots you take and notice whats wrong with it later. Its all well and good that the photographer should have noticed what the light and shade were doing and move the subjects to either a full light or full shade position but thats not what your trying to get at here I suspect=

I suppose you already know its better to expose for the brighest section of a frame to get that right then because you can recover underexposed areas but its a tough gig recovering overexposed images. I hope someone here has a magic wand but I doubt it. Looks like a shot worth something to someone, you know the ones you dont get to shoot again...shame.