Experiment 03 -- Remove Lens Flares

[photoken]

OK, this one has some really nasty lens flares:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lens_Flare.JPG

Let's see what can be done with it....

[MikeFromMesa]

OK, this one has some really nasty lens flares:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lens_Flare.JPG

Let's see what can be done with it....

That is a dandy image you picked for this.

Any restrictions on what we can do? For example, does the entire solution have to be done using PL? Or can we use plugins? Or workflow tools calling PL?

[photoken]

Any restrictions on what we can do? For example, does the entire solution have to be done using PL? Or can we use plugins? Or workflow tools calling PL?

I like to keep these Experiments as "open" as possible, so there's no restrictions. Obviously the most important thing is to explore the features and capabilities of PL, but it's also valuable to see how the solutions obtained with PL compare to the best that can be obtained with other software, too. There's always the possibility of discovering new ways of using PL that turn out to be just as good or better than the other stuff. It's good to know....

[photoken]

One approach to removing lens flares is to clone over the flares. That can be tricky and tedious, so I tried the PL Patch tool. Looks like a very promising start, and it is really quick and easy to use -- much faster than cloning (the Copy Brush).

Here's what I did for the first stage:

Lens Flare 01 patches.jpg

The "a" images are the lassoes and the "b" images are the result after using the Patch tool on the lassoed area. I used odd-shaped lassoes in "2", "3", and "5" to avoid getting obviously copied areas.

The result after this stage:

Lens Flare 01 after patches.jpg

There are still some obvious flaws, but I think I can correct them by "special" darkening and painting with transparent colours. I'll do that in the next stage.

I've complained in the past that the Patch tool needs an option to specify the amount of feathering, and that would still be a nice enhancement, but the current setup works very well in this case.

[photoken]

There were a couple of other areas that needed the Patch tool magic:

Lens Flare 01 patches 02.jpg

Now I've got something decent to work on for the next stages:

Lens Flare 01 after patches 02.jpg

The thing to remember about the Patch tool is that because of its feathering, you need to make a selection slightly larger than the area you want to replace -- see 6a.

[MikeFromMesa]

I have to admit that this turned out to be more complicated than I thought at first.

Since there seemed to be completely different issues in the sky and on the ground I selected the entire sky, created a layer of only that and another of only the ground. I first addressed the ground layer and, with some judicious darkening and cloning, got something that was not awful, but the sky appears to be a bigger problem. The sun is so blown out that I don't even know what is the best way to proceed. I thought about replacing the entire sky with something like it, but don't know if that is within the parameters of this experiment but I have not found a decent way to approach fixing this sky.

[MikeFromMesa]

I am not very happy with this result but it is the best I have been able to come up with so far. In particular I do not know if the yellow around the sun adds to the image or not. I thought about taking it out but part of me makes me think that perhaps it is a plus rather than a minus.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q36z37k5pd56b ... d.jpg?dl=0

I am sure others will have a much better result since I am still trying to learn to use some of the PL tools. In particular there seems to be nothing at all in the manual about using the PatchTool. In fact the descriptions cover all of the other tools bundled in that multi-purpose tool but completely skip over the Patch Tool. I have sort of figured out how to use it, but it is still a learning experience for me.

[photoken]

Hi Mike,
You're right that some decisions need to be made about the sky. Completely replacing it is one option. Personally, I'm going to leave the original sky and retain the "rays" emanating from the sun -- those "rays" add interest to what would otherwise be a very boring white blob in blue.

The only jarring colour I notice in your sample is what appears to me to be a slight reddish tint from the middle to the outer ends of the "rays", particularly the top one and the ones on the left.

The Patch tool is a curious item. The developers admitted it's in PL because of a mistake -- they inadvertently left in the code for it when a general release version of PL was put out a couple of versions ago. It's still pretty useful, see this discussion:
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... tch#p27543
After you've made your selection, clicking and holding down the mouse button anywhere with the Patch tool will copy the area under the cursor to the selection. With the mouse button still held down, you can move the cursor to shift the area that's copied. Sometimes it takes a second or so for the new area to appear within the selection. Releasing the mouse button will "finalize" the patch.

[MikeFromMesa]

Hi Mike,
You're right that some decisions need to be made about the sky. Completely replacing it is one option. Personally, I'm going to leave the original sky and retain the "rays" emanating from the sun -- those "rays" add interest to what would otherwise be a very boring white blob in blue.

The only jarring colour I notice in your sample is what appears to me to be a slight reddish tint from the middle to the outer ends of the "rays", particularly the top one and the ones on the left.

I tried some versions with a different sky but they all made the photo look very different and I did not want to completely change the feeling of the scene. I have a lot of sky images that I have taken to replace existing skies, but none of them actually have the sun shining into the camera for obvious reasons so none of them looked "right" with this image.

As for the colors in the sun, I agree that they are very noticeable and I almost decided to take them out, but then decided that they might add some interest to the image. Then again, perhaps not ...

I believe that all of the work in my photo was down with PL although I still have some trouble properly selecting some parts of images. Not so much in this one and the idea of separating the sky and ground into separate layers, and then files, worked well for me as I could concentrate on adjusting both separately. Still I am sure that others will have done a much better job than I did. I just don't have that much experience working with PL although I think I may be getting better as I practice more.

I must say that you picked a dandy image for this experiment. I think I would have thrown something like this away and not even tried had it been one of my images. Still, it seems to be salvageable. Live and learn.

[photoken]

As for the colors in the sun, I agree that they are very noticeable and I almost decided to take them out, but then decided that they might add some interest to the image. Then again, perhaps not ...

Ah, up until now I've had a sort of "tunnel vision" because I've been concentrating on the ground area, so I looked at the sky in the original image and I see those colours in the "rays". You're right -- I'll need to think about those colours at a later stage. I'm also not sure if I'll leave them in....

[photoken]

My next step was to correct the colours in these areas (compare with the previous image):

remove colours.jpg

I used the Painting tool with a small, fairly soft brush. The options for the Painting tool were:
Channels: HSV
Active channel: H
Intensity: 20%
I used the Color Picker to sample the appropriate colour for the specific areas (dark green for the trees, light green for the grass, tan for the dirt road, etc.) and kept painting until the odd-looking colours were removed. This was fast, imprecise painting. In fact, being sloppy with the brush is an advantage here because it leads to more realistic variations.

At this stage, I'm not concerned about the lightness/darkness, only the colour. The next step will be to correct the lightness values....

[photoken]

OK, here's the result of my next stage -- correcting the lightness and darkness to remove the diagonal streaks from the mountains, trees and grass:

luminance 01.jpg

I duplicated the colour background layer, converted that duplicated layer to B&W using "zero" values in the Grey Mixer, and set that B&W layer's blend mode to "Luminance". Then I used the Darken and the Brighten tools with a soft-edged brush and an Intensity setting of 5% on that B&W layer. This step is very sensitive to the Intensity setting -- 5% is about the maximum to use.

Zoomed in, I had to keep changing the size of the brush while painting -- first matching the size of the streaks to get a general evening out of the values, then using a very small brush to paint within the trees, shrubs, grass and mountains. I matched the direction of my brush strokes to the direction of the branches, rock formations, and grass, etc., until I got the shapes of the trees and such darkened and reading well. Then I zoomed out to the full view and used a very large brush to broadly correct the overall values of the central area of the image (where the lens flares had been) to match the overall values of the areas that had not been affected by the lens flares.

At this point, it's looking good. There's that one area in the center where the green colour has way too much yellow in it. Correcting that will be the next stage....

[photoken]

Whew! Correcting the colour for that central area where the lens flare was the worst took a lot of doing. I painted over it with a dark green from an unaffected area, darkened it and finally used the Hue Editor to change the green to a more reddish green (masking the effect of the Hue Editor to target that central area).

Looking good, now:

finished.jpg

[MikeFromMesa]

Looking good, now:
[/attachment]

Your edited image is a lot better than mine. Just to do a fair comparison I passed them both through PerfectlyClear to lighten the ground image and yours stands up very well. In fact it looks like a normal photo, at least the ground part. Mine, when lightened, shows all of the editing changes I made and does not look good at all.

I will go through your steps myself and see how well I can duplicate your work. Maybe it will teach me how to do this sort of thing better than what I did. This was a very helpful exercise.

Thanks.

[photoken]

Just to do a fair comparison I passed them both through PerfectlyClear to lighten the ground image and yours stands up very well.

There are still about 4 or 5 small areas where the colours and values aren't up to snuff -- if I add a Curves adjustment layer as a test, set it to HSV, and boost the Saturation, they stand out like a sore thumb. I'll need to do some fine-tuning on those areas, but I don't think that will be too hard.

The thing I found out was that I did not need to do any sort of careful, precise painting or selecting. The selections for the Patch tool were quick and simple, and all the painting I did (including the mask for the Hue Editor) was very fast and loose.