Black and White photo restoration

[limey]

Hi all, I've been scouring the tutorials for something that deals with darkening a portion of a photo.
What I have is a photo of a classroom with pupils seated and teachers standing against a large windows on one side of the room.
The photo was taken pointing towards the windows so that the pupils near the camera are perfectly exposed but the ones nearest the window are too light and faded out.
I'm sure I read a tutorial some time ago about dealing with this type of thing but I can't find it anymore.
Does anyone have a solution or can maybe point me in the right direction. I've looked at lots of tutorials these last few days for restoring black and white photos but none of them touch on this problem.
Thanks.

 

[ronmatt]

can you post it? a picture is worth a thousand words

 

[Sark]

There are a number of ways to deal with this problem depending on the particular image. The most likely to cover all situations is as follows.

Duplicate the image in the layer palette and use Levels, or Curves etc on the duplicate layer to correct the exposure of the children at the window. Don't worry about the effect on the correctly exposed children.

Next, add a Layer mask to the duplicate layer and fill it with black paint. This will make the duplicate layer transparent.

Now, when you paint with white on the layer mask, The duplicate layer reappears. All you need do is use a soft brush to carefully paint in the adjusted layers children at the window.

This method gives very precise control. You may get away with just filling the duplicate layers Layer mask with a black to white gradient, but this rarely works adequately. Once you're happy with the result just merge the two layers.

Sark

 

[limey]

Thanks Sark, I will give it a try and see if it does the trick.
Ronmatt if it doesn't work I'll post the pic and maybe you will have an another way I can tackle it, thanks.

 

[limey]

Sark, that method worked great, thanks a lot for the help.