How do you not wash out a white outfit?

Well... it's awfully hard to change one side of a picture and keep the other side untouched. The best way to have done it would have been to try and take the picture from another angle to shed some light on the gnome too? But I can understand that fighting the direction of sunlight is hard.

Try making a selective colour layer in photoshop and adjust the colours to make it brighter. Just forcus on the gnome itself and if and when it looks bright enough, go ahead and use the eraser to erase the parts that brightened the doll.



Here's my try. D: I used the selective colour layer to brighten the colours on the gnome and when I was done, I erased the side with the doll and used the dodge tool on the gnome and the burn tool on parts of the doll's dress.

It's an improvement, I suppose, but I'm not sure if that's exactly what you wanted. I'm sure if you played with it long enough, you'd figure it out. ^^

 

Glad you like it, it was the only thing I could think of. Like I said, you might be able to improve it even more if you mess around with it a bit.

 

Have you replaced the original with this PS manip? Because they look the same on my monitor - which is calibrated.

The main issue here - other than lighting, which could have been manipulated - is metering. All that white is going to throw the rest of the photo into a darker exposure. Can you manually set your camera?

 

No, she didn't replace it. The picture she linked to on her first post definitely looks darker on my monitor than the one I posted after messing with it a bit. It's weird that it would look the same... D:

 

It is all in the lighting. You need to add some fill light to the gnome. This can be done by using a flash on the gnome or reflecting some light with paper or foil or an actual reflector. I played with some settings in Lightroom for you.

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Bumping this up because I'm having similar problem with my guys white shirt, as I was taking pictures of him outside the other day. It was cloudy outside so I set my white balance to open shade, and even played around with the +/- exposure setting, but even doing that, if I did get the shirt to not be blown out, then the shadows would be to dark and vice versa.

 

I don't know how relevant my tactic would be, since I use Photoimpact, an older version that has a function called Tone Map. Whenever there's white, I meter for the white, and then use Tone Map to lighten the mid-tones and deep-tones. That's a lot easier than trying to also tone down the white.

 

Thanks hobbywhelmed. Is there anything I can do before/during picture taking to minimalize his shirt getting washed out while keeping the rest of the picture evenly exposed?

 

I know washing out can also happen if your camera is still using a flash, so try working outside without a flash or a muted flash, that will help to not loose as much detail in the whites and darks. But your gnome isnt getting much light on it while the doll is getting the most at her back, so a better angle would most likely fix this problem, or different positioning of both.