As most of us have figured out at one point or another, a lens hood isn’t always the end-all solution for removing lens flare.

While editing some shots from an outdoor event I covered this weekend, I realized that one or two of the shots came out with some bad lens flare. If I had been paying closer attention, holding my hand over to give a little bit more shade on the glass would have sufficed to fix this. Unfortunately I didn’t do that on this occasion.

Enter Photoshop.

Now, Photoshop does not exactly have a lens flare removal tool (Ironically, though, they do have a tool that adds lens flare). So I had to get a bit creative. In most cases, because this process is so much work, I would probably just throw the photo away. In this case, I wanted to:

1. Keep the photo as it’s the only one of this group of dancers
2. Prove that this was possible in Photoshop.

The process involves a whole lot of cutting, color correction, layers, blending, cloning, burning, dodging, etc… If you’re up to speed on the basics of those tools, you’ll probably be as successful (or more) than I was. OK, let’s get to it.

Step 1: cutting out lens flare

Here, we have to physically cut out the lens flare circles with the circle selection tool and placed them on new layers. This is just for general color correction to get the flare area approximately correct. We are essentially going to have to do this again for almost every logical piece that is inside the flare area.

Step 2: Flare Color Adjustment

Next, apply color balance and channel mixer adjustment layers, one for each flare circle and both of them clipped to each flare circle layer (so the effect is only applied to that layer). Now the flare color is approximately neutralized.

Step 3: Clone Out Simple Flare

Now we’re going to clone out the simple flare areas. By this I mean, pretty much everything but the face. You can use whatever tool you are comfortable with for this. I chose a combination of the clone and patch tools to fix the wall area. I also used healing brush to get a bit of the hair and forehead areas.

Step 4: Use Layers to Fix Detail Flare:

The hair and the eyes are two of the trouble spots because they can’t be cloned or healed in a simple way. Here we make a new layer for the hair only, and one for the eyes only and color balance those layers on their own. We’re also going to have to make use of a curves layer to match the original lightness/darkness.

For the eyes, we have to do a whole lot of burning in the shadows and make use of the desaturate sponge on the areas that are supposed to be black (but are still blue from the lens flare).

Finally, we can merge it down to a single layer and use patch tool or a similar tool to blend the old areas with the new ones.

Step 5: Re-create Eye Highlights

So we went a little overboard with the darkening of the eyes. It was inevitable. In addition, we need to clean up the areas that are still a little bit messy.

First the eyes. She looks like a demon of death compared to the other girls because they all have nice bright highlights in the eyes (yeah… it’s our fault, not hers).

To fix it, we just use the dodge tool to boost some of the midtones, making them into eye highlights. Much better! Now we have an angle instead of a demon.

Step 6: Final Clean Up

Now its just a matter of cleaning up the areas that are a little bit rough still. Here’s the final image after some cleanup.

Step 7: And we’re done!

It’s not so difficult a process, just time consuming… as I mentioned earlier, an easier option might just be to go ahead and use that custom lens hood (aka, your left hand) to block the sun, as was the case here…

Till next time…

-PL

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