Pixiq

So many festivals and public events that photographers want to shoot are held in the middle of the day.  When the sun is out, that means shadows go black and highlights are often blown out because the contrast is too much for the digital sensor to handle. It’s a terrible time to be shooting, but sometimes we have no choice.

I am currently in Lalibela, Ethiopia, leading a photography tour, and my group faced a challenging lighting situation in shooting the annual Timkat festival, a colorful Christian celebration. The procession of priests began about 10:30am, and the picture you see here was taken about a half hour later.  I am quite close to the Equator, which means the sun was very high in the sky creating the worst of all outdoor lighting scenarios.  Thanks to Photoshop’s post-processing tools, though, I was able to make the original digital capture (below) much better.

Here are the steps I used to create the final image, above.  It’s not as perfect as if the sky was overcast, but it’s a significant improvement over the original.  When we all shot film, this would have been impossible.

1. First and foremost, I shot this in RAW.
2. In Adobe Camera Raw, I used the fill light slider to open up the shadows.
3. Also in ACR I added color saturation with the vibrance and saturation sliders.
4. I used the graduated filter (it's the fourth icon from the right in the row of icons at the top left section in the ACR dialog box) to add some density to the sky so it wasn’t so white, I also added some density to the street to tone it down so it didn't draw the eye away from the priests.

Finally, once the image was opened in Photoshop, I used the healing brush to eliminate the electrical wire in the upper left section of the image.