Unless you only shoot models in a studio, you’ve no doubt run into a lighting situation your camera just can’t handle. A very common one is a shaded subject in a bright environment. There are two classic ways to deal with the situation. First is flash. Of course, that only works if the subject is close enough and you have the right flash(es) to achieve the desired effect. The second, which I’ve often used at sporting events where the contestants are wearing caps, is to spot meter on the subject. But sometimes, like in the case of this Inthar fisherman in Myanmar, neither of those approaches will work. I’d really like to capture his wonderful facial expressions, but not lose the rendering of the background. If I spot meter for his shadowed face, I’ll blow out the scenery and even much of his fishing gear. Fortunately there is another solution…

In Color Efex 4.0, nik Software introduced a clever new filter called Detail Extraction. Since I had assumed it was some type of sharpening filter, I had never thought to use it until friend and client Adam Felde mentioned he had had great success using it for bringing out detail in hair, faces, and other dark, low contrast areas of images. (You can see some of Adam’s posts from our recent Cambodia & Burma safari on his blog. He tells me he used Detail Extractor on at least one of them).

Before detail extractor, either an aggressive and destructive use of the Levels (or Curves) commands, or the Shadow / Highlight command were just about the only options. Those approaches are fine for very small changes, but none of them can bring details out of shadows without artifacting as well as the Detail Extractor filter can. For comparison I’ve placed the original image, a Shadow / Highlights version, and a Detail Extractor version below, followed by a larger version of the Detail Extractor one, which shows the most impressive results of the three. The Shadow / Highlight version is also quite good, but I didn’t like the color changes it caused in the hat, or the apparent loss of detail in some skin areas.

The image on the left has no extra filtering applied, the one in the middle was processed using Shadow / Highlight and the one on the right used nik’s Detail Extractor

Much like tonal contrast, another one of my favorite nik filters, or sharpening or blurring tools, detail extractor is often best applied with a brush or some type of mask, so that the effect is applied to appropriate portions of the subject without potentially causing any accidental degradation of the rest of the image. In this case I’ve actually simply applied the effect as a smart filter to the entire image for simplicity.

There are a lot of other useful filters in nik’s Color Efex Pro 4.0, including Detail Extractor, Tonal Contrast, Glamor Glow, and Vignette, to name a few of my favorites. You can purchase it from Amazon for as little as $159.