Come and look at this!!!!

... yells Felix.

[finished version on my [url=http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/1442617]Kinda Horrigans[/url] journal]

Complete rescue job of a photo today - and the end result is rather grainy as a result. The reason is that this was a candid shot of my son playing with his train track and I wanted his feet in the background of the train... but to get his feet when he was running and the light in the room wasn't brilliant - the relatively fast shutter speed meant that the image was seriously dark (actually just very underexposed!). So... it got rescued in Photoshop.

With the RAW file I boosted the exposure by +1.30, dropped the blacks to 0, upped the brightness to +83 and the fill light to 12. I also popped the clarity up by +78. In my head I was getting the shot to something that would work as a black and white so the contrast and details were important, but the effect on the colour not so much. In Photoshop, I converted it to black and white using Silver Efex Pro and then used Topaz DeNoise to get rid of as much of the grain as I could. I used a 50% grey overlay layer to dodge and burn the details - such as the train, track and socks behind... then sharpened and saved.

Tip of the Day:
If you are dealing with low light situations, I'm sure you can do a lot better than me. And this 'Low Light Photography' article will give you some inspiration and ideas for how to deal with it.