advice on a picture and retouching

[aj16hp]

Hi took this picture at a funfair,its not the greatest picture but i kind of like it..

Firstly what could i of done to prevent the light glaring onto the puppet (top right)..Also what software can i use to touch that up?? Cheers andy

 

[Wouter]

Considering the amount of light difference between the brightest and darkest path you couldn't have done anything more in-camera. Unless you like very dark shadows. Did you shoot RAW or jpeg? This photo has no Exif data so I don't know what Ricoh camera you used. If you shot RAW you could recover the highlights. That can be done with most RAW converters like Adobe Lightroom, Silkypix, Capture One, etc. If you this photo was taken in jpeg the options are somewhat more limited, because the jpegs have even less dynamic range than the RAW files.
You could use Photoshop to retouch some of the glaring, but it will be very tough.

 

[aj16hp]

Hi Wouter i shot it with a Grd 1, in jpeg..I posted elsewhere trying to find out how to prevent it,and they basically said re-position or shoot it underexposed then fix it in PS...Thks for the advice

 

[tommy]

I think it would not be so hard to fix in PS (or Gimp, as I use). What I tried was I cut out the head of the lower left puppet. Then I masked out the glared portion of the upper right puppets head, resized the cut out head to fit, pasted it over the glared part, and smoothed the edge. The same can be done with the back, and upper left puppets head, likely with the same cut out part in different sizes.

I actually pasted the head i two different layers, with different masks and opacity, to make all transitions look acceptable, but it could probably become very good with a little more effort, say an hour of work (for me, at least)

 

[aj16hp]

Thks for the advice Tommy !! I'm not that hot on photoshop yet,so i may come back to the picture at a later date!!
andy