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Flash Coverage
Reducing the fall-off effect in flash pictures

see copyright notice.

This is a typically disappointing flash picture, taken with a "point-and-shoot" camera. The camera did its best, but the subject in the foreground is a bit washed-out while the one further away is in shadow.

I made two copies of the image. The first was processed with a gamma of 0.8 to stretch the highlights. This made the background even worse, but the plan was to use only the foreground areas from this copy.

In the second copy, a gamma of 1.7 brought out the detail in the background, then a further adjustment of contrast and brightness made the background detail look similar to the foreground in the first copy.

Rather than two separate adjustments (each of which slightly degrades the picture quality), the required effect could have been achieved by applying a single tone curve - but that needs a bit of practice!

Finally, I had to combine the best areas of the two images. In Corel PHOTO-PAINT (TM), I pasted the first image over the second, then used the Object Transparency Tool to make the pasted image transparent where I wanted the second image to show through.

home photos campaigns tech drink&food philosophy
creative image proc probs solved museum
noise flash contrast fringes shading