MFG Photography wrote:
Hey MM! I did a bonehead move today in the studio. I thought I had my fill light metered correctly today when i was popping off some head shots. Once I got home and looked at these on my PC, I noticed a drastic shadow on the left jawline and under the chin.
I have an Adobe Elements 7 "help" manual but can't seem to find a technique that seems to work. I'm far from the master at digital enhancement, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Dan

When you describe the shadow as drastic you are basically describing an image that isn't worth fixing.  But some of the basic things you can try include copying the shadow areas with some generous feathering of your selections, to a seperate layer, more than likely you will want to duplicate that layer, and adjusting the the blend mode to something like screen and then adjusting the opacety of that layer. Other ways you could adjust the layer with the selcted areas is to use the curves and levels adjustments.  I highly doubt from what you described any of this is worth trying, but its a starting point.

MFG Photography wrote:    Hey MM! I did a bonehead move today in the studio. I thought I had my fill light metered correctly today when i was popping off some head shots. Once I got home and looked at these on my PC, I noticed a drastic shadow on the left jawline and under the chin.

Don't be afraid to chimp on the set.  Some people have pride issues; other people use every tool they can.

MFG Photography wrote:  I have an Adobe Elements 7 "help" manual but can't seem to find a technique that seems to work.

I hope you had the foresight or regular practise to shoot in Raw mode.  Then you can make a conversion with elevated levels and combine it with the regular conversion in Photoshop by a technique known as contrast masking.  I call it a "one-and-a-half" HDR technique to distinguish it from the ordinary three-shot HDR.  Some say that you can feed the two pictures into regular HDR, but I haven't had success that way, though I haven't tried it with EXIF info wiped.

To do the contrast mask, first add a new layer to the ordinary Raw conversion (16 bit TIFFs, hopefully).  Paste the shadow conversion into that layer.  Then copy the one of the image layers to a new layer, desaturate it, invert it, blur it slightly (about 2 pixels radius) and apply it as a mask to one of the image layers.

You have to fiddle with this, to find the right layer to apply to.  It's been a while since I did it since I do three exposure HDRs these days and use PS CS2 to do a "Merge to HDR".  Best thing to do is to search the web for "contrast mask".

Rebel Photo wrote:    after seeing a thumbnail of one of the images...it's a very weird effect....very un natural.  I still say, (from what I could see) it's some type of cream used by the subject.

Some makeup uses things like titanium dioxide which fluoresces at the UV frequencies put out by electronic flash, essentially capturing invisible UV and re-emitting it as visible light.  Always specify "photographic makeup".

Monito -- Alan wrote:

Some makeup uses things like titanium dioxide which fluoresces at the UV frequencies put out by electronic flash, essentially capturing invisible UV and re-emitting it as visible light.  Always specify "photographic makeup".

that's used in some acne creams if I'm not mistaken.