Reclaiming an underexposed dark pinup photo tutorial!

What’s happening, @threespeak? I just wrote an entire freewrite because I expected this video encoding process to take hours. I thought for sure it would take even longer to upload, but my reliable MacBook Pro surprised me. It’s done, and the upload here is going pretty fast. I guess I’ll just share this tutorial tonight. I’ve done a few of these over the years. Usually I keep my techniques close to the vest, but when I do share my trade secrets, it’s here and on Patreon.

This is a tutorial on how to reclaim severely underexposed photos. I was shooting with my friend Audrey in New York City. It was run and gun late at night. Our only light was the occasional lamps near subway entries and restaurants. Most of the shots I took were properly exposed with a steady hand [and steady model], but this shot was about three stops [at least], underexposed. You could barely see the original. It took some work, but you can pull some miracles out with the power of raw files.

This is an in depth walk through of how to salvage a once lost image. There’s a lot of techniques in here that come from a much different angle than your typical YouTube Photoshop blogger. It’s a sophisticated way to illuminate the subject while still preserving the mood and seduction of a dark pinup shot. Near the end, I even get in to some digital painting techniques. I’ll be posting more of these. Thanks for watching and for more tutorials, follow me here @kommienezuspadt.