How to correct flash flare?

XE
Posted By
X_Eyed_Bear
Jul 5, 2006
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282
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3
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Closed
I have some images (obtained by scanning some old colour transparencies) which have significant flash flare – where the flash has bounced off a reflective surface. I cannot seem to find an acceptable way of eliminating this flare in Photoshop, even after a Google search of the web and a look through this forum.

The main problem is that the flare has gradients in colour, saturation and texture. as well as being an entirely irregular shape of course.. Using the clone tool, or healing brush, does not seem to work satisfactorily. This may be because of my own inexperience.

Is there any advice?

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B
bwright
Jul 7, 2006
X_Eyed_Bear wrote:
I have some images (obtained by scanning some old colour transparencies) which have significant flash flare – where the flash has bounced off a reflective surface. I cannot seem to find an acceptable way of eliminating this flare in Photoshop, even after a Google search of the web and a look through this forum.

The main problem is that the flare has gradients in colour, saturation and texture. as well as being an entirely irregular shape of course.. Using the clone tool, or healing brush, does not seem to work satisfactorily. This may be because of my own inexperience.

Is there any advice?

A technique from Katrin Eismann’s excellent book "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching 3rd edition" goes something like this:

Zoom in on the flare and use a 3-pixel lasso tool to select it.

Inspect the individual channels. If one has less damage from the flare, activate it and Edit>Copy. Activate the other channels one by one and Edit>Paste Into to repair these damaged channels. This removes the flare and also the color.

Add a new layer and change the blend mode to Color.

With the clone stamp tool, sample similarly colored areas and clone over the black-and-white area.

As long as you have one reasonably good channel, this should fix it. For more extreme cases, Eismann has a more involved procedure that is best detailed in her book.

Hope this helps.
XE
X_Eyed_Bear
Jul 7, 2006
wrote in message
X_Eyed_Bear wrote:
I have some images (obtained by scanning some old colour transparencies) which have significant flash flare – where the flash has bounced off a
SNIP.
Is there any advice?

A technique from Katrin Eismann’s excellent book "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching 3rd edition" goes something like this:
Zoom in on the flare and use a 3-pixel lasso tool to select it.
Inspect the individual channels. If one has less damage from the flare, activate it and Edit>Copy. Activate the other channels one by one and Edit>Paste Into to repair these damaged channels. This removes the flare and also the color.

Add a new layer and change the blend mode to Color.

With the clone stamp tool, sample similarly colored areas and clone over the black-and-white area.

As long as you have one reasonably good channel, this should fix it. For more extreme cases, Eismann has a more involved procedure that is best detailed in her book.

Hope this helps.
I guess you are referring to the section starting on page 263, under the heading ‘Correcting Lens Flare’. I saw this entry in the index and ignored it because it didn’t say ‘flash flare’. But now that I follow your advice and have read this section, it looks directly relevant. I’ll try it.

Many thanks for the pointer.
XE
X_Eyed_Bear
Jul 7, 2006
wrote in message
X_Eyed_Bear wrote:
I have some images (obtained by scanning some old colour transparencies) which have significant flash flare – where the flash has bounced off a
SNIP
Is there any advice?

A technique from Katrin Eismann’s excellent book "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching 3rd edition" goes something like this:
Zoom in on the flare and use a 3-pixel lasso tool to select it.
Inspect the individual channels. If one has less damage from the flare, activate it and Edit>Copy. Activate the other channels one by one and Edit>Paste Into to repair these damaged channels. This removes the flare and also the color.

Add a new layer and change the blend mode to Color.

With the clone stamp tool, sample similarly colored areas and clone over the black-and-white area.

As long as you have one reasonably good channel, this should fix it. For more extreme cases, Eismann has a more involved procedure that is best detailed in her book.

Hope this helps.

I have now tried this technique; sadly it does not apply.

Ms. Eismann describes a technique for removing an artifact in the image (at the bottom of Figure 7.82 in her book), casued by internal reflection in the camera lens. What I am want to do is to remove the reflection of the flash from a shiny surface – analogous to removing the large area (the sun) that is blown to white in the top third of Figure 7.82. That should be relatively straightforward for the image in Figure 7.92; my image sadly has gradients in colour, texture and saturation in more than one direction (because of the irregular nature of the reflecting surface) – but is not radial

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