Lens flare removal

- I recently released a new course called Enhancing Landscape Photography with Lightroom and Photoshop, wherein I explain how to, I don't even need to finish that sentence, it's about editing landscape images with Lightroom and Photoshop. In that course, I do some work on this image right here. And during the process of working on that image, I point out the lens flares, and I say that maybe I'll get rid of them later and maybe I won't. I hadn't made the decision at that point. Since I made that course, Adobe has released a new version of Photoshop, which has some changes to an existing tool that make it much easier to remove lens flares, and I want to just show that to you here today.

So I've got this open here in Photoshop CC 2019. And I'm going to start with this big flare up at the top, which I really should've spotted while I was shooting, but I don't know why I didn't. If I had, I could've simply hung my hand up in front of the lens to shade the lens, and probably prevented it. Now, you may be familiar Content-Aware Fill from previous versions of Photoshop, which does a spectacular job of figuring out what should go inside of a selection. Adobe has revamped Content-Aware Fill and added a very important capability.

I'm going to go up here to Edit, and choose Content-Aware fill and that's going to take me into this completely-separate content-aware environment, or content-aware fill environment. So this looks a little confusing at first, I've got a toolbar over here, I've got this shot of my image with my selection, and for some reason this big green thing. Then over here, a preview of the area that is covered by the green. And what you can see now in my preview is that the lens flare is gone, Photoshop has successfully filled that area with the right content. What's cool about this new take on content-aware fill is I have control of which places in the image Photoshop is going to sample to generate content to fill my selected area, and those areas are indicated by green.

So what Photoshop has figured out is that this entire green area is a good source of new pixels for the area that need to be filled. And in this case, it got it right right off the bat, so I'm going to just say OK to that to select it, and it has given me a new layer with that fill in it. I can turn that off, and there's my original. So this gives me a nice non-destructive way of doing these content-aware fills. Let's do one that's a little bit harder so that we can see some of the other option that this new tool provides.

I've got this green one right here that I want to take out. So again, I'm just going to use the Lasso Tool. I could use any of Photoshop's selection tools to do this, the Quick Select Tool which works more like a brush, but not be a bad alternative either. So there's a little, I don't know what this is, an outhouse or something here that the lens flare's right on top of. So I want to be sure that Photoshop doesn't pull from there, that's the tricky part about this particular fill operation. Again, up to Edit, Content Aware Fill, I'm sorry before I do this, I want to make sure you saw another step that I took, which is I needed to switch back to my background layer because by default, when you come out of Content Aware Fill, if it has made a new layer, that layer is selected.

As you'll see, I have some other options for what it does with its results. So, here Photoshop has decided that this is the area that it's going to sample from, and you can see that it's not doing a great job. It's pulled in part of the roof, part of this thatched roof over here. So, I would like to remove that from the sample source. This brush over here lets me simply brush into the green area and take those bits out of consideration, and now it's changed.

So now it's changed to, I don't actually know what that is. What I'm going to do is paint out everything that's not sky. I don't want it selecting sheep or any of these buildings or anything else, so I'm just going to paint this out, works just like any of Photoshop's other brush tools. I can change size with all the usual keyboard shortcuts, that's looking pretty good. It's now at least sampling from the hillsides rather than from those other areas. However, it's darkened the area up above.

I'd like to say something else that's interesting. When I was preparing for this, I did this same edit last night, and it filled it in a completely different way, that might be because I hadn't made the same selection, but it's curious that it's done something very different this time. It did do this same thing last time of make this too dark. Fill settings gives me some options for what it should do after it has copied data into the area. The color adaptation is maybe easiest to understand if I turn it up way high. That's the very high setting, so you can see that it's trying to fit the pixels that it's copied in into the filled area.

It's trying to examine pixels underneath and find color matches and whatnot, and it's not doing a very good job, so I'm just going to turn that off, and that gives me a very clean fill. It will also rotate textures and fills as it puts them in. I've got that off right now, that's not really relevant to this particular image if I was sampling on top of a tiled roof or a brick wall or something, that might be more useful. I can also tell it whether I'm willing to have it scale or mirror the textures. And these popup things give you very nice tips as to what these different options do.

Finally, this is what I was mentioning earlier, how it should output. It defaults to output to new layer. I can actually have it just go right back into my original layer, or I can have it duplicate the original layer and make changes there. These basically give me options for whether I want to work destructively or non-destructively. On an edit like this, I definitely like the option to have it come into a new layer. I'm going to deselect my selection there. So, here is the layer that is erasing that flare. It's doing a very good job by doing it non-destructively, if I came out here and maybe zoomed in and got another view or something, and decided I didn't like it, I haven't messed up my original layer.

I can keep this one and try again, and keep doing it until I get it right. So here is my original image, I had a bad flair-up here, another one down here. These two layers take care of those, and they've done a very good job. And as you can see, it's a very, very easy tool to use. Content-aware fill is not only useful for fixing lens flares, it's great if you stitch a panorama and are missing data in the corners as often happens, anytime that you need to patch some part of an image with content from another part of the image, this very often is much faster and yields much better results than trying to do it yourself with a Rubber Stamp Tool.