Lens flares rears it's ugly head :/

caero · September 12, 2007

Greetings,

Well I was a guest at a family get together where all parts of the family got together in fashion.

I set myself up for taking a picture of each couple outside using some fill flash. About 60 couples all in all.

Well everything went well with 59 couples. But somehow I must have hurried on the one that went wrong as I didn't chimp enough to notice the ugly lens flares on this one.

Now I have tried Andy's tutorial tips on removing lens flare and have gotten rid of some of the lens flare on her face and in the bushes, but I cannot for the love of god remove the ones on his shirt and pants. Ugh it's a big one.

Any help?

Below is the link to the file:
http://www.sunepedersen.com/IMG_9833.jpg

Thanks for any suggestions in advance!

pyrtek · September 12, 2007

This is a very difficult case. It's doable, but it will take you a long time.
I'm sorry that I don't have the time to do it for you, but here's a tiny hint of
proof that it can be done. I hope that at least motivates you. What I
did was:

1) Create an empty layer in color mode.

2) Sample the jacket color and set it as the foreground color for the brush.

3) Painted with it on the flare. This gets rid of the flare, but also ruins the
texture. We will get it back in step 4.

4) Use either the clone tool or the healing brush to bring the texture back
to the painted areas.

I did these steps partially and came up with this:

As you can see, it's doable. It will take a lot of effort, though.

BinaryFx · September 12, 2007

This is the result of 20 seconds work in Photoshop, channel blends only - no selections, masks etc. Much better can be done, but this is just to show that one can fix up the suit very quickly and mask it in etc. The luminosity issues are harder to deal with but as demonstrated below they can be addressed and the colour is very easy to fix up.

I am hoping to come up with a much better method so I have not bothered to list the steps here (but if you know your 10 channels and apply image then this should not be a big problem).

Let me know if more info is required, I will try to get back with more detai later and list the better steps.

Until then some further reading:

Channel Blending:
http://www.ledet.com/margulis/Poetry.pdf
http://www.ledet.com/margulis/Numbers.pdf

Every File Has 10 Channels:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/howto_mask10.html

Sincerely,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

nikos · September 13, 2007

I tried various methods and this one worked the best for me:

1. Select the color replacement brush and set the tolerance to 20

2. Sample a correct color for the jacket and then brush away the flare. It'll look a bit washed out at first but it's okay. Then sample other correct parts of the image and remove the color casts for those areas.

3. Add a new layer, fill it with 50% grey and set the blending mode to soft light. This will act as your non-destructive dodge burn layer.

4. Select the brush, set the background /foreground colors to their default black /white and then set the opacity to 10%

5. Select black as your foreground and then using different size soft brushes, start bringing the luminosity levels of the flared areas as close as possible to the unaffected neighboring areas.

6. Select the healing brush and sample a good area of texture on the jacket. Make sure you line up the jacket's lines and start adding texture back to the faded areas of the jacket.

I did this technique to the gentleman's right shoulder.

I didn't finish the image but you can get an idea of it's effectiveness to the point that I restored.
HTH,
Nikos

caero · September 13, 2007

Thanks all for your excellent suggestions. Still learning here as always

I'll try applying some of your techniques to save this one !

thanks again

BinaryFx · September 13, 2007

caero wrote:

Thanks all for your excellent suggestions. Still learning here as always

I'll try applying some of your techniques to save this one !

thanks again

I will flesh out the quick method that I demonstrated earlier.

The basic steps were:

1. Work on a dupe in LAB mode.
2. Apply the Blue channel of the original to the L of the LAB mode file in darken mode.

(these two steps were the fast bit)

3. Layer the LAB mode file over the RGB original.
4. Add a layer mask hiding the correction.
5. Paint in white in the layer mask to reveal the correction where needed.
6. Add a new transparent layer above all other layers set to Color blend mode.
7. Using a brush and sampling nearby colours (or rubber stamp), touch up the colour to match.

Below are the results of rough masking of the correction into the affected areas and colour blend mode retouching to restore colour. I did not bother fixing the minor flare above their heads, you should get the idea with the major damage removed.

Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

Lens flares rears it's ugly head :/

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