“Underexposure – Resurrecting An Image From the Dead!” by David Ziser of Digital Protalk is a video tutorial that shows how to rescue a severely underexposed photo from its RAW file using a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

Faced with an extremely underexposed photo of two important guests at a wedding reception, David goes through method steps for rescuing the photo starting in Lightroom, and laying on the final touches in Photoshop. Bringing up an image’s exposure by more than a stop or two usually introduces excessive noise and artifacts — David eliminates as much of that as possible with Nik’s DFine 2.1 noise reduction software, and then masks what is left with a few blurring and vignetting tricks.

Here is the video from Digital Protalk:

The video finishes with some wise words: the end result is not perfect and won’t look great as a large print, but it is certainly better than being empty-handed.