What’s wrong with this picture?

Pretty much everything is wrong with this picture. The biggest issue, of course, is the extreme contrast. I took this shot in midday with strong, direct sunlight while the hotrod car was parked in the shade. I actually took this shot to show what not to do in photography.

The other problem is the background. It’s uninspiring and messy. It detracts from the subject, as does the very light sky.

To save this picture and make it a lot better -- not great but better -- is to first deal with the ugly contrast (overexposed highlights and underexposured shadows) and then replace the background.

So, I opened this shot in Adobe Camera Raw and moved the highlight slider all the way to the left and the shadows slider all the way to the right.

That made a huge difference, as you can see. I then selected a background lit from direct sunlight and pasted that to replace the original disappointing background.

To avoid big problems like this, if you are shooting outdoors in midday sunlight and the contrast is bad, select subjects that are front lit with as few shadows as possible. If a cloud cover comes, or even if a single cloud covers the sun, that’s the time to shoot like crazy. Alternatively, as your subject to move to the shade of a tree, the side of a building, etc. Sometimes there just nothing to do except do your best in Photoshop to mitigate the problem. §