Experiment 03 -- Remove Lens Flares

[photoken]

OK, I did some final finessing:
Used the Painting tool set to HSV mode and the "H" channel to paint with a dark, yellowish green over some of the areas that had too much of a dark red colour cast. Then I used the Brighten and Darken tools on a B&W Luminance layer to further adjust the values of some areas. Then I flattened the image and used the Darken tool directly on some small areas. After that, it was a matter of spot-knocking with the Remove Brush.

I added a Curves adjustment layer with these settings:

Curves final.jpg

to slightly darken just the darker areas (without sending them to featureless black) to compensate for the overall lack of good darks in the original image because it was shot directly into the sun.

Finally, I added a High Pass adjustment layer (blend mode = "Overlay") with a Size of 5.0 to slightly sharpen the image. (This is the equivalent of the notorious "Clarity" adjustment in other programs. )

The layers look like this:

layers final.png

And the result:

Lens Flare 01 final.jpg

Here's the link to the full-size image:
https://www.dropbox.com/l/72u4bUbOheBsynrTyqKmLn

There will always be some little things to fix, I guess, but this is enough for now. I'm happy with it.

[greenmorpher]

Terrifying! I'm going to live with flare!

Why did you ay the High Pass filter was the equivalent of the "notorious" clarity filter in other programs (presumably P'shop). Why "notorious"? And ewht does "High Pass" mean anyway?

cheers, geoff

[photoken]

Why did you ay the High Pass filter was the equivalent of the "notorious" clarity filter in other

The "Clarity" adjustment in other programs is way too seductive -- the temptation is really strong to apply it to everything. In PL, it's also "notorious" because, unlike other editing software, there is nothing anywhere that is labeled "Clarity". When you understand what those "Clarity" filters and adjustments do -- increasing the contrast at edges of areas -- then using the High Pass adjustment layer with a blend mode of "Overlay" is one of a couple of methods to get the "Clarity" effect in PL.

An in-depth explanation of the High-Pass filter (in Photoshop): http://www.digitalphotopro.com/software ... M21i8u_yCg

[Hoogo]

At first I have a look at the channels.
Sometimes the flares come in a color that leaves one or two channels without that error.
And sometimes the object beneath the flare is of a quite uniform color. In that case all 3 channels are more or less the same, just with different brightness and contrast.
And when both events occur at the same time, then the problem can be solved quite good and easy with this receipt:

Replace the destroyed channel(s) by an intact one and use a curve to care for the different brightness & contrast.

Channels.jpg

The purple flare on the left is invisible in the green channel, so that one will be copied to the other two and adjusted.

Helpful tools for this are an adjustment layer "histogram correction" on top of the picture. Move the right edge far to the left so that it is easy to see small differences in dark areas later.
The panel "adjustment layer" will save a lot of clicks later, too.

1) Select the flare and quite some wood around it. Convert the selection into a new layer.
2) Use the channel mixer on this patch to copy the green channel into red and blue: Click on the button for grey output, type 0/100/0 into the 3 textboxes.
3) Now the patch looks black and white. The layer mode itself is still RGB, so some RGB curves can be applied to it.
4) Here I already created a curves layer, but without any adjustments, and enabled the histogram layer to make it all bright.

Step2.jpg

5) Drag & drop the curves in the layer list to the cutout part of the picture. Nothing happens, beside the curves layer is now a child layer of the patch, and it will only change the patch.
6) Turn the layer mode of the patch into "difference". Something dark blueish and reddish will appear.
7) Now open the panel "channel list". It's usually hidden beneath the layer list. Turn off all eyes but red.

Step3.jpg

8 ) Now check the panel "adjustment layer". It should show the curves, as the curves layer is still the active layer.
9 ) Select the red curve. Play around to make the wood-part as dark as you can. Ignore the flare part, it will appear much brighter.

10) Turn on green on the channel list, turn off red. Just to check that the batch turns black: The green channel was not changed, so there's no difference.
11) Turn on blue, turn off green. Go to the curves and adjust again.

[Hoogo]

12) Mostly done, now you only have to clean up all the helpers and make a better mask for the patch:
-Make all channels visible again,
-Go to the layer list, turn the layer mode of the patch into normal, turn off the histogram layer. The flare is gone:

Step4.jpg

Other errors are introduced,for example the sky, and also the grass and the house got the color of the woods.
Now it's a good moment to add a layer mask to the patch, fill it with black and paint the flare away in this mask with a white brush. This painting can be quite rough, there's only a small difference between the patch and the picture.

Sometimes you can have the luck that a flare is only visible in a single channel. Then you can have better quality when you don't select grey in the channel mixer, but only the channel with the error.

The huge green flare in this picture can be removed the same way, just with different channels.
The others are present in all channels.
Sometimes the channel mixer can still do with some subtraction, I will check for that.
Otherwise curves will still be a good idea, but it will take much better masking.

[photoken]

Replace the destroyed channel(s) by an intact one and use a curve to care for the different brightness & contrast.

Thanks for explaining this interesting technique. I have never used the Color Mixer, so this was good to learn.

I got good results using a simplified version of that procedure:

channel mixer 01.jpg

1. Copy a "patch" from the original image layer to a new layer.
2. Add a Color Mixer adjustment layer to the "patch" layer.
3. Adjust the percentage sliders for each colour channel to get a good colour match as seen in the main editing window.
4. Add a mask to the Color Mixer adjustment layer, fill the mask with black, and paint with white to apply and blend the Color Mixer adjustment to the patch.

I did that for 3 "patches" -- the mountain, the dark trees in the middle, and the lighter grassy area and surrounding trees. (The Automatic Lasso tool did a fine job of quickly creating the selections for the "patches".)

The larger multiple flare area is going to be much harder.

[Hoogo]

Oh yes, you are right, you can take care of brightness and contrast with the channel mixer. Lower value in the slider for a channel gives less contrast, higher values in the slider for constant gives higher brightness. Curves may be a little bit more flexible, but channel mixer alone should do most of the time and takes less steps.

It is even easier and more elegant if you want to combine the method with the optical feedback of maximum darkness:
-Select the patch. It's not even necessary to cut it out and place it on an own layer.
-Create an adjustment layer "channel mixer". The selection automatically turns into a mask.
-Turn the mode of the patch into "difference".
-and so on...

[photoken]

Lower value in the slider for a channel gives less contrast, higher values in the slider for constant gives higher brightness.

Ah, yes. I didn't realize that -- it's a good thing to know.

Curves may be a little bit more flexible, but channel mixer alone should do most of the time and takes less steps.

I'm experimenting with the Hue Editor for this. It gives more flexibility and control than the Channel Mixer. I find it easy to set a point across all 3 of its "channels", and I like being able to adjust the Hue, Brightness and Saturation individually, and in one dialog. Because those adjustments are on a curve, that helps with lens flares where there are variations across the shape of the flare itself.

You're right about not needing to copy the patch to its own layer. I find it more convenient to create Hue Editor adjustment layers for each selection on the image. As long as I make the initial selection slightly larger than necessary, I can paint on the mask of the Hue Editor to nicely blend in the correction with the unaltered areas of the image.

[dutchman]

Hi all,
I've tried to find a sophistcated way to create an acceptable solution, BUT...
This one is awesome.
Tried everything, which meet my skills. Nothing worked. Hours of work... for nothing !
OK to improve my PL skills.
So I did ordinary brush healing, brush copy and for the trees on the top of the hill I painted over the trees with a one pixel brush.
After that I sharpened and darkened the complete image.
This one I did in half an hour, because no color adjustments, layers, masks and tricks are needed.
After spending HOURS of testing and "try and error".
The result:

1280px-Lens_Flare1.jpg

[Hoogo]

I'm experimenting with the Hue Editor for this. It gives more flexibility and control than the Channel Mixer.

Usually I avoid filters that touch hue. I can't think of a natural effect that spins hue in a foto, so spinning back won't undo those effects.
Not that copying channels is any natural here...

Curves are fine to undo effects where a uniform color was overlayed. But it needs finer masking.

[photoken]

So I did ordinary brush healing, brush copy and for the trees on the top of the hill I painted over the trees with a one pixel brush.
After that I sharpened and darkened the complete image.
This one I did in half an hour, because no color adjustments, layers, masks and tricks are needed.

Looks great!

You're right -- these lens flares are so bad in places that I think the only way to correct them is by doing a lot of painting (and cloning) by hand.

[dutchman]

Hi Ken,
thanks, but your work ist the more sophisticated approach. Just fine!

If you didn't saw the original before, it's hard to see the manipulation. (I my opinion in both results).
And of course, I can "optimize" the result, but (as allways) my work is OK for me. (After spending hours of failures) I guess the same for you.

AFAICS there are three endresults? Correct?

Best regards from Stuttgart
toni

[Hoogo]

The blue flare in the center is visible in all channels, least in red, worst in green.
I used the channel mixer with +200/-120/0 to create a b&w-picture where the flare was gone:

Flare.jpg

I kept following the receipt from above and colored with curves until I had minimum difference.
Still the receipt didn't work:

Flareb.jpg

...too noisy, no matter how perfect the masking would be. Denoising turned it into some cloudy stuff .

Now that I see the result it's obvious why it looks so bad:
If you would have taken 2 photos, one noiseless at very low ISO, one noisy at very high, and you subtract one from the other, you will get the noise pattern as result.
And it's not that much different if you subtract 2 similar channels from each other. The similarities extinct or at least decrease each other, while noise goes up. Mostly Jpg-artifacts here.

The result would have been good if the flare was much more present in the worst channel and less in the best channel, so that the channel mixer could work with less extreme values. And if it wasn't a jpg. Such a flare would have a deep, saturated color, this one was only faint blue.

I'll check curves alone for this spot.

[photoken]

AFAICS there are three endresults? Correct?

Hi toni,
Yes, so far three of us are participating in this Experiment.

[photoken]

The blue flare in the center is visible in all channels, least in red, worst in green.

Yes, the first thing you did was to look at the individual channels, and I think that is a very good approach. It seems to me that, as a general principle, if the flare is obvious in all three channels, it is most efficient to clone over that part of the flare, since there will be very little original image data to recover from those areas.

If you would have taken 2 photos, one noiseless at very low ISO, one noisy at very high, and you subtract one from the other, you will get the noise pattern as result.
And it's not that much different if you subtract 2 similar channels from each other. The similarities extinct or at least decrease each other, while noise goes up. Mostly Jpg-artifacts here.

This brings up a point that I've long been curious about: One of the obvious features of Photoshop that is missing in PL is "Image Arithmetic", where images, layers, etc., can be combined in various ways. My questions for the Photoshop users are: Do you use that "Image Arithmetic" function? Would that be a valuable feature for PL to have?