Pale backgrounds (1 Viewer)

Apologies if this has been covered before;

I've decided to spend dark winter evenings learning CS3, my first puzzle will be flight shots against a light background. If I have a bird against a pale background, lightning it causes the background to be overly white. I want the pale bird against a darker background so which function should I use to avoid this? Example attached , ta!

Hi James,
You want to have a play with the blending modes in PS.
For instance if you have an image of a blue sky with some clouds that you would like to use for the overexposed sky in the bird pic.
Put the sky pic in a layer behind the bird pic, highlight the bird pic layer and scroll through the blending mode options.
They're fun to play with and can give some unexpected results.
Other ways of doing what you want are doing careful selections of the bird and pasteing it into a new layer and then puting the new background in a layer behind.
A 1 or 2 px feather of the bird selection can help it blend in better.
Then again on rereading your post I might not be quite understanding what you want to do ?
Happy PSing

Jim
I've used this site to glean a bit of info about photoshop. Should be of help to you.

It is always better to get the exposure right at capture but that is pretty obvious I know and wont help you here.You can try the `Shadows and Highlights`feature in Photoshop but to be honest you will struggle to get it any better than you have already as underexposed shots are very noisy.

Taking photos with the sun behind you would be the ideal situation.
In this case if you have taken the photo in raw you could convert the photo twice, once for the sky and another with an exposure for the bird and combine the 2 photos with layers and layer masks.

You could still use layers & masks with 1 jpg and have a gamma adjustment for the bird layer. Theres multiple ways to do this.