Light Spots

fredjclaus · October 23, 2011

I was on a portrait session this afternoon and saw this great piece of drift wood. It was the end of the shoot so I asked the parents to come sit on the log. Everything looked nice, but my lens hood didn't work and I got this light flair. Is there a way in Photoshop to get rid of it?

BinaryFx · October 23, 2011

Hi Fred, did you shoot raw? To lessen the flare and highlight blowout, you could try to render a separate version that has negative exposure and or highlight recovery settings applied. This could then be layered over the top of the regular exposure image and blended and or masked to lessen the effect in the lighter tones.

This may not fully fix the issue, however it will give you a better starting point than the image posted above. If you can then post a sample of the darker image straight out of the raw processor that would help.

Regards,

Stephen Marsh

fredjclaus · October 23, 2011

No Stephen, I didn't shoot in raw (Sorry Sam). My camera was set to jpeg due to a trick or treating event at my church. I was doing some family fun shots and did it in jpeg. Forgot to switch to raw for this portrait. Is it still removable?

BinaryFx · October 24, 2011

Hi again Fred,

Sure there are some things that you can do in say Photoshop, one just has less to work with in terms of the blown detail...

Attached is a very quick edit. Obviously, with higher resolution data one has to take more care, it is hard to see what is really going on with such a low res image.

One could try to burn the sunspot/flare, but that never seems to work well.

What I did was to copy out a section of the darker right hand side of the woman's torso, flipped horizontally and distorted and layer masked it into position over the lighter left hand side. I also did a little bit of colour blend mode clone stamp on the adjoining area of the man's top.

I also put in some blue sky in darken blend mode and made a very rough mask of the folk's heads and faces so that the darken blend did not intrude. One can be very rough and ready and not need a perfect mask when using this approach. I also added just a little extra contrast with a curve and also with a move similar to clarity, to add midtone contrast.

It wil come down to your retouching skills in Photoshop or another pixel editor, however I think that this image is recoverable.

Best,

Stephen Marsh

Light Spots

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