extremely under exposed

[feliciab5034307]

need help salvaging an extremely under exposed photo from a canon 80 D. Any suggestions?

[Per Berntsen]

Is this a raw file or a jpg?

Can you post the image here? If it's a raw file, post a jpg version.

And what software do you use?

[feliciab5034307]

unfortunately, it looks like jpeg . not sure how my RAW setting was changed . I have adobe P.S. and lightroom

[Ussnorway]

if its a Jpg then you are screwed... the camera prob has a few pre-made edit modes which only make Jpg instead of Raw

p.s, the only time I want under exposed is when taking images at night... the moon is a prime example because it is so far away, under exposing is the correct way to get the craters looking right

[Abambo]

Open in Photoshop, apply the Adobe Raw file (I'm assuming you have a pretty current Photoshop), choose Auto on the develop parameters and see what comes out.

Step 2 is not necessary, but may help...:

Step 3:

Step 4:

...and continue editing from there...

some noise reduction is necessary:

This picture is a crop from an underexposed picture my children took at my brother's wedding. It's not what I would call extremely under exposed... but it's for sure an out of focus picture (even the rest is out of focus). And the flash fired according to the exif data...

So it may be that you could bring back the file to life, but the result will at least be bad to satisfying.

As Lightroom uses the same RAW developing engine you can also use Lightroom, but returning from the filter and as we used a smart layer, we can mask out again some of the edits returning parts of the pictures back to it's origin. It's a matter of preference.

[Bill Sprague]

I googled for "fix underexposed photo" and got a lot of hits.  A "power tool" for this in the Adobe line is Photoshop.  One of the google hits is on one of the better YouTube channels, PHLEARN.   There is a tutorial there for doing this.

How to Fix an Underexposed Photo in Photoshop - YouTube

[Abambo]

Try opening in Adobe Camera Raw (ACRJ even if it’s a JPEG image. ACR comes with Photoshop. You can invoke ACR from Bridge or in Photoshop as a filter. If your file is a RAW file it will anyhow be opened with Camera Raw as Photoshop can not ope RAW files. But also JPEG files can be edited with Camera Raw.

Use the Auto develop on Camera RAW. That will set the parameters as if there is correctly exposed picture. So for a correctly exposed picture there will be little effect. But for under- or overexposed pictures   the effect may be too much. So experiment with the sliders (exposure et al) to get a good result.

If the image is really badly exposed, you will, however, have only bad results. But sometimes that is better than none...

[josephlavine]

You've already been given some great advice. I'll just add that there are many ways to adjust the exposure from the Camera Raw Filter to adjustment layers, such as Exposure, Curves, and Levels. That said, you'll get the best adjustment results when working from a raw file.

good luck

[feliciab5034307]

thank you everyone for the suggestions still working on

[josephlavine]

Have you tried the suggestions?

Although this doesn't help now, one good habit to get into is paying attention to the histogram on the camera's LCD screen, which will help you avoid the situation. Often, the image on the LCD screen tells just part of the story, but the histogram is a great resource.

Best