Lessons

Lesson Info

Fixing Lens Flare

this morning, I'd like to start off with revealing some of the things we did yesterday. I want to show you a few other applications of the techniques and give you somewhat of a summary that you might not have been able to absorb this well yesterday because you've gone through so much that your brain was didn't have as much space left in it. So let's take a look first. Open a simple image. It's of a vintage trailer, and it has just a simple problem. But it's a common problem, and that is it has a little bit of lens flare in it. If you look in the doorway of the trailer and I'll zoom up near that area, you see an area here that's a little bit brighter than the surroundings, and that's not uncommon, right? So let's look at an easy way of fixing it. The idea is to use curves because in curves, weaken target a very specific brightness level within our picture, and then we can move our mouths on top of something else to see how much light is in it make it have the same amount of light, and t...

he reason why we're using curves instead of other adjustments is if you think about all the other adjustments in here. Brightness and contrast levels exposure any of these things. None of them really let you target an exact shade of gray toe work on. Instead, they have more generic controls, like an overall brightness control that type of thing. But if we do a curves adjustment layer, so go to bond with my layers palette to that half black and half white circle inches curves. I need to click on the hand tool that's right over here to tell a photo shop. But if I click on my image to do something related to curbs, and then I'll just move my mouse into the area where the lens flare is, and I'm just gonna try to be consistent with where I click as faras, there's a texture here. Within this door area. There's like dark vertical lines within it, and I'm either gonna be purposeful to click on those vertical lines or stay away from them, some consistent. When I click within the lens flare and when I click above it, I don't want to click here where it's a lighter area And when I move above it, click on a darker one you know, like one of the dark stripes. So I'm gonna pick the gap in between those little thin stripes and I'm just gonna click the mouse button right there. That's gonna have photoshopped measured. How much light is in there and in the curve? It allowed a dot. That represents how much light is there? That dot is just like a dimmer switch. We just need to figure out how high or low to move it to make the brightness the same as somewhere else in the photograph. So what I'm gonna do next is move outside of the lens flare. Remember, I clicked right about here when I was in the lens flare, and I'm just gonna move above it to where we're outside the lens floor. But I'm still on the same kind of material. I'm not on one of those vertical stripes that air in that texture that would be darker instead of on the same kind of area. In all I'm doing is looking and curves to see where the little circle appears. The circle tells me how much light is in the area. where my mouse is. And if that's how much light I want with lens flare is I need to move the dot we already have down to that same height. All I need do is move it right back right down there and you can do that in a couple different ways. You can just do it visually where you remember where that circle is, and then when you go on, move your dot just move it straight down. So it's at the same height or, if you want to be more precise about it, their numbers in there at the bottom of curves, you find two numbers, input and output, and when I move my mouse around my image, those will change and they just tell you how much light is in each area. So I'm on this area that doesn't have a lens flare, and I look in there and I see the number 41. Now. If I move into curves, it stops thinking about my image instead of thinking about my image. It thinks about this little dot that's right here that I could move up and down, but instead I could just come in here and type in and output number output would say how much light I want to end up with. And that's what I would get off the image when I had my mouse outside of the lens Blur. Remember when I saw the number 41? I think it waas just type it in now that dark in the image with lens floor didn't go away because it darkened the entire image. And so we have the amount of darkening we need. Now we need to just isolated into the area where the lens flare Waas. To accomplish that, we're gonna paint on a mask with a mask. Remember that any area that is white allows the adjustment toe happen. So right now, the adjustments happening to the entire picture. Now I could paint with black and paint over all the stuff. I don't wanna have changed, but I would have to paint over 98% of the image, and that's not very fun. So I mentioned a little trick that I used to get the mask Teoh be black and that as I use a keyboard shortcut, the shortcut is command. I on a Mac Control I and Windows and what it's a shortcut for is this adjustment right here. Invert gives you a negative of what you have. So that means white areas will turn black. Black areas will turn white, that type of thing. So if I were to type command, I'd be the same misusing this command. And if you watch in my layers panel, you'll see that mask change from white, which means apply everywhere two black, which means don't apply anywhere. And so if you get that mask to be black now, that adjustment is not affecting any part of the image. And it's up to me to come in here and grab the paint brush tool and to make sure I'm painting with White because white is what allows the adjustment to apply. So I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna just my brush. I'm gonna try to get the edge of my brush, the softness of it to match how soft the edge of the lens flare is. Otherwise, if I use a hard edge brush, we're gonna have an abrupt stop to our adjustment. It's not gonna blend into the surrounding image if I have to soft of a brush the adjustment is gonna go past the edge of the lens flare and just slowly fade into the rest of the screen door. That's there. I need my brush to match the edge of this. Up until now, what I've used to do that is a square bracket. Keys on my keyboard had pressed the one bracket key to make it larger, the other to make it smaller. And if I held the shift key, I can control how soft the edges. So shift right bracket would make a harder edge shift left bracket would make a softer edge. The problem with that is there was no visual indication of how soft it is. Instead, you kind of guesting or your do it from memory to know how much of a change you're getting in the new version of photo shop. There's a different way of changing how your brushes and that is on the Mac. You hold down the control in the option keys, I'm gonna hold them down right now. That's control an option I have held down. Now I'm gonna click my mouse. It gives me a preview of my brush And if I drag one direction I'm gonna change how soft the edges dragging vertically, my great up I get soft down, I get hard and if I drag right, I get bigger left. I get smaller. So what key was that? I'm holding out. I'm holding down two keys on the Mac. It's the control key and the option key. And I'm embarrassed. Say that I can't remember what it is on Windows because it's only one key on windows. So what that means is on windows, try the modifier keys, meaning shift ault control. Just try one at a time. Click on your image and drag. Just make sure that you're in a painting tool so that you would be able to change your brush size, and you can very quickly discover what it is. It's one of the few keyboard shortcuts where the Mac and the Windows ones are different in that the Mac uses two keys and on windows that uses one. So if somebody happens to know the exact key to hold down, you could tweet it out there, and we can mention it in a little while. So anyway, that makes it a little bit easier to choose a brush that has the same edge quality as the lens flare. If I hold down both control and option, then I click my mouse button and I can see how soft that edges and I'll just strike up to get softer or down to get harder. And I can see what it looks like and get it. So the edge of that looks like the lens flare. Maybe somewhere around there. Now I can come in and and remember, I'm painting with white, and I'm just gonna paint in the adjustment, and I need to be careful that I don't go beyond where that lens flare would be. Paint it in. All right now, on occasion, you'll find that whatever it is is to brighter too dark. And that's just because wherever you clicked within this, you ran into an area that was just the tiniest bit brighter or darker than the average of that lens flare. And if that's the case, if it's too dark, you could lower the opacity of layer. That a lesson the adjustment and won't dark in the images much if, on the other hand, is not dark enough, then adjusting the opacity can't make it any darker because you're already at full strength and so you'd have to go to your curve in that dot that you had you have to move it further down. Remember the dots like a dimmer switch. So you just need less like, in my case of anything, I think that it might be the times bit too dark. So I'm gonna just my capacity. When I just opacity, I go to the top of my layers panel. I click on the word opacity and I drag it all the way down. I just keep them out Spotting held down. So what happened is I started by mouse on top of the word opacity I dragged to the left. It went to zero. And then I keep the mouse held down and I slowly bring it up while I look at the picture. And that way I could judge which visually going on in that image and try to get it just right somewhere in that general zone. If let's say the lens flare, for some reason was not affecting, would as much that's on the doorframe, then what I could do is grab my brush instead of painting with white, which allows the adjustment to apply. I get paint with black because in a mask, planning with black will prevent the adjustment from applying to something. It's not that I want to completely remove the adjustment. If I did that, it would look like this and it would be too bright there. But what I might want to do if I choose on do just gonna type Command Z for undue. I can lower the opacity of my brush. That way, when I paint with black instead of removing the adjustment completely, I can tell it how much of the adjustment to remove. So maybe I bring my opacity down to maybe 20%. And then I paint across the wood and I'm only gonna remove 20% of adjustment will be really subtle. You might not even be able to tell unless I choose Undo. A few times you see the wood changing a little bit. If I typed command Z multiple times now I'm gonna turn on that thing where you can see my keyboard shortcuts sell up to the upper right here. Drunk keyboards, short fronts. Didn't want to have that on earlier. Get fiber to change my brush size. It just shows up too much. But from now on, I'll leave that on. So this is one way we can reduce or eliminate a lens flare. The only problem is that on occasion, the lens flare is not just brighter than the rest of the image been. It'll have color to it. It will be green or some other color, and that's when I'm going to need to use the same general idea. But instead of working on the main curve, that's here. If you remember when we tried to get rid of sunburn, but we tried to get one side of a sky to match another side of the sky, there was a technique. I talked about where we can match the color of one area to another, and I would use that technique. It's similar to what we did here, the only difference being instead of working on the RGB curve, we work on the individual ones of red, green and blue. And that's where we had a weird keyboard shortcut. We had to hold down in case you don't remember what it waas, it was shifting command. You probably won't get that in your head until you've used it quite a few times. But shift command, you clicked on. What that did is when you clicked and added three dots one red, one green and one blue. And then you typed in output numbers from a different party. Your picture. But the concept is very similar to what we did here, so that's getting rid of a lens flare using curves. Let's do another image. You remember this image used it yesterday. I messed with it a little bit when I was back at my hotel last night, because any time you working live on an image in your monitors as far away as mine, I do kind of somewhat basic things. And when I have ah, monitor really close to me and I have like no no time constraint, his first doing things expend as much time as you want. It's not that I spent a tremendous amount of time on this, but I did a little bit more than we did yesterday, so I just want to show you what I ended up with. First, let me show you the original picture. I'm going to hide all the layers except for the bottom one in the way you do that as he hold down the option key on a Mac ultimate windows and you click on the bottom eyeball because that's the eyeball for the layer that contains your picture. So hold on option and click on it. And this was our original picture. And since I was there when I took it, you know, I knew there is an iguana sitting there and everything, but what I felt was interesting was when I worked with this yesterday, I think Michael, you mentioned that you don't even see the iguana. At first you were just looking at the scene, and since I was there and they were moving around and spitting and all that stuff, you know, my brain, it's like looking iguana. And I hadn't even thought that somebody might not even see it. And so I thought that was a pretty interesting thing. So I'm not sure if that was the same for anyone else. But if it waas, let's see if I made it any easier to pick up that there's an iguana in there. So this is the before, and this is the after and so it should make it so It's pretty hard for you not to look at the A t that area. Now, if you see the before as well as the after, then you're like, Well, yeah, look at what you did to it. But if you never saw that before, then you don't always know that something's going on there.