Recovering an image, foreground under exposed due to background very light

 

A NOTE ASIDE:

I'm beginning to get lazy. The translation from the original language to English is done by Google Translate, the innovation in our time, the importance of which I cannot exaggerate. It's "crowd funded", that capital invested is the sum of the work thousands have voluntarily contributed in making it better day by day.

It's now resulting in acceptable translations. It's magic!

...using Gimp.

This is not an instruction in how to do it, it's just an experiment. If one is interested in the social actions in a an image like this, the interaction is the thing you are looking for.

Just to give an idea how to attack the problem, this is a try out I found interesting.

so, this is the original image:

Then I did the following:

GIMP:

Image->Mode->Grayscale

Colors->Curves (get the best result you can.)

Shadows-highlights->Highlights (-33%) (80)

Tools->Select by color (select the white sky)

Ctrl-a,Ctrl-c

File_>Create from clipboard

Color->Curves drag down to a minimum (drag the line towards the lower right corner)

Ctrl-A, Ctrl-c

go back to the original, press Ctrl-v

-here the "paste" mode [Ctrl-v] was supposed to be abandoned by selecting Tools->select->square" and clicking in the image but it didn't work so I saved the image, then the lock released

The result is some white outline artifacts and some cloudiness that didn't survive, but you can see what those involved are doing. In addition, the forest in the background survived and a decent resurgence of the water. This still *when viewing the image in Gimp*.

In the *saved image* the outline artifacts disappeared, surviving only around the head of the person  standing in the boat as a white halo. Luckily some things wasn't saved :0)

As a result of the "Ctrl-v" didn't working, Gimp hanged, the application from which I dragged the image hanged, I had to close both to be able to continue working.

Discussion: One could assume that if the image had been saved between the steps described above, the result might have been better. I suspect that Gimp didn't quite manage to keep all the actions in memory (for the sake of the "Undo" function)

It was interesting in any case.

I was just interested in how much you could do. I am

fully convinced that if you redo this you will get a different result. It IS a bit difficult to describe "Curves" in text, just to take an example.

Still, the social actions were now available to see. The mother is pointing out to her father what he should be thinking about when transporting her offspring on the water. Not going too fast and showing off. It's enough taking them out for a ride :0))

An interesting experience for a the father of the children's mother.