best way to remove lens flares in photoshop?

[ernie]

when shooting long exposures at night i sometimes get a few annoying lens flares in my pictures (especially when using zoom or standing close to light source). was just wondering what tools everyone here uses in photoshop to get rid of them?
i use the clone tool often, it's ideal for a black background, but with a more complicated pattern that often comes up short. the burn tool (darken it) works too sometimes. but none of those two are 100% proof.

so how do you all get rid of your lens flares in your pictures?

 

[Arch]

depending on the surrounding area, the healing brushes can sometimes be used, but most of the time the clone tool is your friend.

One tip if you really can't get it right on the image, is to use the clone tool on the channels rather than actual image.

 

[Peano]

so how do you all get rid of your lens flares in your pictures?

It depends on the image. It always depends on the image.

 

[DSLR noob]

I try and shield the lens with hoods/my hand. I've never actually bothered trying to save a picture with flare. So my approach is to just prevent it from the beginning.

 

[Dubious Drewski]

Are your lens flares very saturated in a certain colour, like green or red or blue? Does this colour stick out from the rest of the image. If it does, say so and I'll type out how to fix it. Otherwise, I'll be spend all my time writing how how to fix it for nothing.:x

 

[ernie]

indeed, my lens flares from long exposure at night always tend to be a very saturated green.

i've found some other manuals on the internet as well, and i found that selecting the flare (with lasso tool) and then putting some color and contrast adjustment layers over it works very well. not perfect but it's better than just using the dodge tool.

 

[Dubious Drewski]

Er, maybe that works but there's a much better more reliable way.

With one single adjustment layer, and no masking or selecting, you can do this within 15 seconds:

Step 1, add a hue/saturation adjustment layer over your original image:

Step 2, Change the selection from all colours(which is called master) to green specifically. Don't close the hue/saturation window.

step 3, Now with this hue/saturation window open, you're automatically going to have an eyedropper tool activated. After you've selected "green" from the dropdown box, proceed to actually click on your image exactly on a green part of your lens flare. This helps the tool narrow the type of green down more precisely. After doing this, don't close the hue/saturation window.

step 4, Drag the saturation slider way down, until it doesn't look green anymore. Then you'll very likely have to drag the lightness slider down too.

And that does it.

 

[ernie]

awesome! it isn't 100% perfect but with a little selective dodging and burning i can get it 99% perfect. thanks a lot man!

 

[Amateur Wannabe]

I'm new here so I'll say a couple short words of intro. Back in the dark ages, I did semi-professional photography with a (at the time!) nice Canon AE-1 and a selection of Canon and Nikon lenses. Now I am retired and love to scan and work on digital images - especially old family photos for our family genealogists.


Now - to the matter at hand. I got the first image below from a friend a few days ago. Normally, I'd pass due to the heavy duty lens flare and move on to the next image, but this is the only photo we have of a deceased high school classmate - so that's not an option.

Any image information that was under the flare is gone. I'm trying to learn some of the advanced tools in Photoshop but I don't think I understand some of them well enough. While they methods described in this thread helped, none got me as far as the manual (and tediouw as hell) use of our good friends Mr. Clone Stamp, Mrs. Healing Brush, and their kids cut and paste.

After all that work I still don't think it looks that great anyway. Is this the best I should expect without spending weeks on it?

Thanks for any feedback.

Original

Messed With

 

[Flash Harry]

I'd give it another shot after calibrating my equipment, colour and levels are well out. H