Getting rid of flare in image

I previously posted a question on how to remove flare from an image and a few people had some good suggestions. I tried one borrowed from Katrin Eismann's Photoshop Restoration & Retouching where you copy the data from one channel with no flare into the channels with flare. She then has you use the clone stamp tool to re-populate the selection area with color data as the selection has no color after this procedure. I am able to get everything except the color back corrrectly, it seems extremely dark compared to the sorrounding areas of the image. Any ideas or help would be appreciated!

If you use Camera Raw for editing, the clone/heal tool there does a marvelous job of removing flare. As long as you have enough similar pixels to handle it.

I've found that a decent result can be had (particularly on large flares) by dropping into Lab mode and using clone to take out the flare on the a and b channels -- it will be immediately apparent as a blank spot of a different color. Then, go into the L channel and carefully use the burn tool to darken the luminance areal of the flare. If done with enough care (usually involving several undos when you overshoot the mark on the last step), you'll wind up with the flare just about completely gone.