lens flare

I would really like to save this image. I have tried cloning out this flare with no acceptable results. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help,
Ed

Clone tool at 400%, multiply repeated samples, a immense amounts of patience. Seriously, you can do it but you'll need a 5-7 pixel clone tool.

An additional hint, Jim, add a layer. This is the layer in which you will patiently do your paintbrush editing. Jim is absolutely right; you have to work at a large percentage, and set your paintbrush for perhaps 15 to 20% coverage.

Carol

Ed, color clone this
make a new layer, set to color blend mode, set your cloning tool to sample all layers.
should be fairly straightforward i'd say 30mins of work.

Wim

Ed, all the suggestions above are good ones. Have you tried to use a quick mask to copy and move adjacent tones over the flare?

Check out Katrin Eismanns' retouching book. She's got several good techniques for removing flare.

You could try a layer with desaturated red channel and blending it in.

'Cloning Color, Retaining Texture'.
Tony Kuyper's excellent tutorial may be the answer, along with the other suggestions.

I agree with John - may be a perfect case for Tony K.s technique.

I would create an Curves adjustment layer to reduce the red of the flare (e.g. input 68, output 60) and use the layer mask to mask out everything else (i.e. fill with black, paint a white circle over the flare).

This isn't very helpful for your question, but did you ever notice that animators often add "lens flare" to scenes where the characters fly and the sun is in the background? Lens flare is not natural, it is an artifact of cameras. They're simulating something "unreal" to make an animation feel more real. My head reels, really.

Pete D.

Cloning color like in Tony's tutorial along with a curves adjustment layer will fix most flare issues, I think this would be a relatively simple on to do with that approach.

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone; much appreciated.

Ed

Ed, after you rework the image to your satisfaction, could you repost it? I'd be curious to see the final result, especially since I think the basic image is very strong, even with the flare.


And add a general description as to what you did. I'm sure that it will help a lot of people, myself included.

That article from Tony Kuyper was also in the recent issue of Outdoor Photographer. I'd never considered it before, but as others mention above, this seems like a good shot to try it on. I downloaded the jpg above, and it took me just a few minutes to get rid of the lens flare.