As an artist, mistakes happen. The good news is they're always fixable. Even a tattoo. The most influential teacher in my life, Mr. Adam's, always used to say, "There is no such thing as a mistake in art." Mistakes are opportunities to learn and get better. Not only in art, but in your personal life too.

Case in point: I was on a recent real estate shoot and I goofed. I forgot to take a properly exposed image of the bathroom. Because I shoot with lights, this technique can require several photos in order to get the proper exposure. I blend them in photoshop when I can't get the shot in one image. Since I shoot in RAW, all was not lost. Let's take a look.

This was the main image, or so I thought. I forgot to change my exposure to account for the dark bathroom after setting a speedlight in the dark shower. In my opinion, when you shoot RAW, it's generally better to start with a darker image than an overexposed (too bright) one. The reason is the shadow areas will contain more detail than blown-out highlights.

This is the image just after some basic adjustments in lightroom. Because RAW has so much more information in the file, the results can be quite dramatic. If I had shot JPEG, which I have before, I wouldn't have been able to get the image this bright without some serious issues. The shadows would have had more noise and the highlights on the lights would have been blown out with no detail recovery possible.

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Here you can see what I did after pulling the files into Photoshop CC. I added the closet shot, brightened the shadows and fixed the color casts. A trick you can use get a mask so that you only affect the areas you want is to apply a channel to the mask using the Apply Image function under Edit. Pick the channel with the best information or contrast and invert it. For instance on the first curve called "brighten shadows" I applied the blue channel to the mask and inverted it so the highlights are masked the shadows aren't. The top curve was a mask with all RGB channels inverted on the mask. It works wonders!

Here is the final image despite my goof at the shoot! It won't win any awards by any means, but it does successfully show off the master bathroom of this home about to hit the real estate market. Since I choose to shoot RAW, I was given the flexibility to fix the image that I wouldn't have shooting JPEG.