Removing Road Glare in Photoshop?

bmweerman

I have shot tons and tons of motorcycle road shots for magazines and glare continues to be a problem. I was getting decent results using a high-end P&S, but recently aquired and digital SLR, a Panasonic FZ-50 which is about as much as I would spend for a tank bag camera. Equipped with polarizing filter and UV filter I just finished an assignment and the content is OK but I have worse glare problems than before.

2 questions.

1) How can I avoid this in the future?

2) Can shots like this be saved? I have Photoshop CS2

webelevy

Not sure how you can avoid it but have you tried using the Shadow/Highlight tool in CS2? I find that adjusting the highlights will knock down the glare significantly.
Merv

bmweerman wrote:

I have shot tons and tons of motorcycle road shots for magazines and glare continues to be a problem. I was getting decent results using a high-end P&S, but recently aquired and digital SLR, a Panasonic FZ-50 which is about as much as I would spend for a tank bag camera. Equipped with polarizing filter and UV filter I just finished an assignment and the content is OK but I have worse glare problems than before.

2 questions.

1) How can I avoid this in the future?

2) Can shots like this be saved? I have Photoshop CS2

drdane

Looks like a normal road to me! Are bike shots supposed to look different?:D

No glare, as the sun is to the right and slightly behind the camera, so a polarizer would probably be wasted.

There's a technique using a clone tool on "darken" mode to deal with burned out spots, but it's not appropriate for the asphalt here as it's way to big of an area.

If you want it darker, you could select it and use curves or levels to bring the values down. Do you have an example of what you DO want? That would help us give you better suggestions.

PamR

As Drdane mentioned, you can make a selection of the roadway, then use curves or levels to darken the road. That's what I did here. I also painted with a black brush on an empty layer set to soft light to increase the depth:

Duffy Pratt

Converted to LAB. Curve on L channel to lighten the white stripe and darken the darkest part of the road. Shadow/highlights on L channel: highlights at something like 67, 56, 12, shadows I don't remember, but to try to get some detail in the bike. Convert back to sRGB.

Duffy

bmweerman

PamR wrote:

As Drdane mentioned, you can make a selection of the roadway, then use curves or levels to darken the road. That's what I did here. I also painted with a black brush on an empty layer set to soft light to increase the depth:

I like this fix the best. And as per the previous request I will post a pix that I think looks correct. Thanks to everybody!