Brighten pic's w/o losing quality?

[flippyot]

Recently a friend of mine had an important event and wanted myself and another person take pictures of it. Well the other phtog's digital camera ran out of juice after a few pics (forogt to recharge, RF 1 - Digital 0).

Well three of the rolls I shot didn't get processed correctly. ISO is 200 but I had it set for 400 and told the lab to push it. THey failed to do so even after I marked those rolls with bright red stickers.

So now I'm stuck with photos that look like they were taking during a power outage and everytime I mess with them in Photoshop I notice the quality gets degraded. Is there anyway to brighten photos without getting that white out effect?

 

[Doug]

Sorry to hear of the problem, especially irksome for an important event. Color neg film does not take kindly to underexposure, being much more tolerant of overexposure. But one stop under shouldn't be "fatal", just make lower tones lose detail & color saturation and go grainier. There's an inevitable loss in image quality, but you can make the best of it...

In your graphic editing program, you'll be able to display a histogram of each image... The left end will be "clipped" and the right end will be empty (typical look for underexposure). You can move the highlight slider at the right end leftward until it touches the first bit of the data curve, setting that as your white point. That will lighted the whole scan proportionately, and should get you close to the best it can look. A bit of tweaking of the histogram's center control and/or the Curves feature might help, and you can also increase color saturation somewhat. If the shadows still look muddy and grainy, you can move the black point slider on the histogram a little to the right to see if you can clean it up by darkening the shadows.

Good luck!

 

[fbf]

Try use multiple times of Curves to increase overall exposure, then use multiple times of Curves to make contrast. This works for me most the time but I have no idea how underexposed your shots were, so the result may vary.
Good luck.

 

[flippyot]

Thanks for the help!

Once I get off work, I'll try these out and hopefully make some pictures my friend will love.