I NEED MAJOR HELP PLEASE

useitorloseit · Dec 23, 2018

I am attaching two files a Tiff and a PSD file of the same picture I took of the capital building here in San Francisco with my Mavic Pro. I am severely bummed out because as I was in a hurry and running out of battery I was squeezing off the last of my shots.....and ended up running a 30 clip 4K and the picture I got was beautiful. Of course it looks terrific on a cell phone, iPad...etc However it is severely under exposed and I have been attempting to save this thing for a week or so, the disappointing part is I actually have two clients that would like to purchase this ASAP and I just can get rid of the noise/grainyness in the sky. Nor can I lighten up the underexposed aspects to save the details.....etec I typically shoot everything in RAW so this wouldn't be a problem if I hade just followed what I typically do. If anyone can please help me with this I would be truly grateful for you and owe you ever dying gratitude. Thanks you guys for even taking the time to read this. Now remember as I mentioned I simply played this in Adobe Premiere, found a straight on shot that looked straight....etc and did a hold keyframe and export. So that is what you are looking at, with a few little edits I did do myself. If needed I can include the actual image I exported.

JDawg · Dec 23, 2018

I am green but I am fairly certain there is not much editing you can do to JPG's.

sar104 · Dec 23, 2018

That sky is absolutely not recoverable.

Blucenturion · Dec 23, 2018

Shoot it again. Winter sunsets like this are frequent.

Meta4 · Dec 23, 2018

useitorloseit said:
I am attaching two files a Tiff and a PSD file of the same picture I took of the capital building here in San Francisco with my Mavic Pro.
So that is what you are looking at, with a few little edits I did do myself. If needed I can include the actual image I exported.

What you've posted are two jpg files of what you've done to the original image.
I can't pull anything (useful) out of them.
Can you post the original unmolested image?

BD0G · Dec 23, 2018

Yup. If you try and work with the exposure value the sky will be even more crunchy. I just did a quick auto correct in Lightroom which gives one a baseline series of levels to begin working with.

It will look like this

Go back and shoot a bracketed series of .dng (RAW) files and them there is alot more overall information that one can work with (as you may already know)

BD0G · Dec 23, 2018

Meta4 said:
What you've posted are two jpg files of what you've done to the original image.
I can't pull anything (useful) out of them.
Can you post the original unmolested image?

He indicates that he messed up and did not shoot any RAW (.dng) images. So the compressed .jpg images that the Mavic produced will not yield any real results.

Rockowe · Dec 23, 2018

This would have been a great Bracketed opportunity

ie… To Have SHot three Pics AT various brightnesses and used an HDR combining Program of sorts - or Photoshop or LightRoom

This is the BEST Iv got - but like SAR 104 said - … The Sky is Trashed - Best you've got is to smooth it...
In this pic - you do have some Recoverable lowlights (Shadows)

gjmphoto · Dec 23, 2018

Definitely put up your original, unretouched starting point. I have some techniques I'd like to try with it.

BD0G · Dec 23, 2018

Rockowe said:
This would have been a great Bracketed opportunity

ie… To Have SHot three Pics AT various brightnesses and used an HDR combining Program of sorts - or Photoshop or LightRoom
View attachment 56685

This is the BEST Iv got - but like SAR 104 said - … The Sky is Trashed - Best you've got is to smooth it...
In this pic - you do have some Recoverable lowlights (Shadows)

Absolutely! Bracketing would have made this image pop . even 3 exposure bracketing would have been sweet! Heck even a single exposure RAW file would have captured alot more information to work with. The sky is soooo crunchy in this compressed .jpg it hurts my eyes.

AeroMirage · Dec 23, 2018

WithTheBirds · Dec 23, 2018

The unfortunate reality is a screen grab from 4K footage will be limited to web publishing use no matter how much you fiddle with it....

Meta4 · Dec 24, 2018

BD0G said:
He indicates that he messed up and did not shoot any RAW (.dng) images. So the compressed .jpg images that the Mavic produced will not yield any real results.

What he posted are not the .jpg images that the Mavic produced.
If he posts the original image, it might be possible to get more out of it than he has already.

And contrary to popular opinion, you can usually get quite good results out of original jpg images.

BD0G · Dec 24, 2018

Nightime , underexposed , blurry jpegs . Good Luck! Somepne please prove me wrong.

Meta4 · Dec 24, 2018

BD0G said:
Nightime , underexposed , blurry jpegs . Good Luck! Somepne please prove me wrong.

It's definitely not a winning combination.
I'm just interested to see how much/little there is to play with in the original.

Here's a better exposed nightime jpg:
Shot 20 mins before sunrise so it was pretty dark.
Grain you could walk through because ISO was 1600 to allow 1/100th sec shutter to deal with the movement but the overall image is still fairly pleasing.

WithTheBirds · Dec 24, 2018

Meta4 said:
It's definitely not a winning combination.
I'm just interested to see how much/little there is to play with in the original.

Here's a better exposed nightime jpg:
Shot 20 mins before sunrise so it was pretty dark.
Grain you could walk through because ISO was 1600 to allow 1/100th sec shutter to deal with the movement but the overall image is still fairly pleasing.

The original is a frame grab from 4K video- worse than a still jpg as a starting point...

You can’t make strawberry jam out of pig s*#t unfortunately.

Aerobatty · Dec 24, 2018

Meta4 said:
What you've posted are two jpg files of what you've done to the original image.
I can't pull anything (useful) out of them.
Can you post the original unmolested image?

Lol!

"Unmolested"

I like that.

BD0G · Dec 24, 2018

The frame grab would be slightly better if it was of a "keyframe" and does not appear to be so.

I just got some strawberry jam for Christmas from the neighbor!

crlmjohnson · Dec 24, 2018

used your editing software and see if you can change it to Black and white.

Kilrah · Dec 24, 2018

Yup, need to be careful to take the still of a keyframe, but even so based on how it looks nothing is likely going to make it even remotely satisfactory. It looks crud even when downsized to postage stamp size.