319 Reducing glare in a photograph

Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. Today, I'm going to show you two, count them, two different ways to remove the effects of glare from a photograph. Specifically, the glare associated with light reflecting off of a shiny surface, as witnessed in the lower left corner of this board game. And you can see not only do we have some glare in that blue west region, but also across the spaces making them very difficult to read. And, of course, it creates an inconsistent effect throughout the photograph.

We'll start with a quick and easy method that may or may not work. And then we'll move on to a more labor intensive method. That produces great results as you you can see in this final version of the photograph. Here let me show you exactly how it works. All right just, so you have a chance to see it on screen. Here's that reflected glare, and here's the restored version of the board game. So, I'll start things off by showing you that quick and easy technique. What you do is you open your image that has the glare obviously.

And then you press Ctrl+Shift+N, or Cmd+Shift+N on the Mac, in order to bring up the new layer dialogue box. And I'll call this guy anti-glare, and then I'll click OK. Next you want to select the brush tool. You can see that I've got a very large brush to work with here. I'll right click inside the image window to bring up the brush's panel. Notice that the harness value is cranked down to its minimum of 0%. That's generally exactly what you want, by the way. And then set the size to anything you like. So you want to basically match the size of the glare, is the idea.

I've set my size value to 1,000 pixels. And then you just need to click in what appears to be the center of that glare. Now, you may find that you need to drag around a little bit, but usually a single click will do you. And now that we're done with the brushwork, I'll go ahead and switch back to the rectangular marquee tool. All right, now we want to change the blend mode, that's at work at the top left corner of the layers panel, to overlay or you can experiment with soft light. If you like. I'm going to just choose overlay and you can see that we get a nice contrast effect but there's too much contrast associated with it.

So I'll go ahead and press the Escape key, so that overlay is no longer active here on the PC, that's not a problem on the Mac. And then you can just press a number to reduce the opacity. For example I can press the three key, to reduce the opacity value right here to 30%. And that can work very nicely. I'll go ahead and zoom. In on my image here. And then I'll turn off this layer. So this is the original reflected glare. And this is the new, muted glare, thanks to that simple overlay technique.

Now the problem in our case, is that our whites are starting to look pretty murky. Notice that they look kind of brown. Almost as if they're singed. And that's because we are applying a burning effect, here in Photoshop. Now you can mitigate that by taking the opacity value down even farther. I could press the two key to reduce the opacity value to 20%. At which point I have less singeing, but of course the glare is coming back, as well. So you may find that that technique works. If so, great, because it is so very simple.

But if it doesn't, what you're going to have to do is roll up your sleeves, and engage in a little more effort. And let me show you what that looks like. First, I'll go ahead and press the back space key with the delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of that anti glare layer. And now notice that the glare is pretty much located in this blue field in the bottom left corner of the game board. And that blue represents the western portion of the United States where this game is concerned. Notice that the mustard colored South is not particularly affected, and neither is the beige Mid-West.

So it's really just a phenom inside of this blue region which means that we need to select it. And the easiest way to select areas of color inside Photoshop is to go up to the select menu and choose the color range Cmd. Note, that keyboard shortcut, that's a custom shortcut, that I created using the keyboard shortcuts command under the edit menu. Unless you did the same thing, you're not going to see a shortcut, because there isn't one by default. I'll go ahead and choose the Cmd to bring up the color range dialog box, and then I'll click someplace in this region of blue to begin my selection.

So, I'm clicking with this eyedropper cursor. Now those of you who are familiar with this dialogue box know that this area right here, the central sort of black region, that's a selection preview. And anything that appears white will be selected, and anything that appears black will not be selected. And we'll get a clearer sense for what's going on there in just a moment. But it's pretty obvious even now that not enough of the image is selected. And that's because I need to add more key colors to my selections. So first make sure that your fuzziness value is cranked down to 40.

Which is the default incidentally. And then press the Shift key. And just drag around inside of the blue field. Like so. So you want to drag over dark blue, and light blue as well. We want every bit of blue to be selected. And what's good about shift dragging with the eyedropper cursor is that you're adding key colors on the fly. All right, now you can see these pretty big white regions inside the selection preview, but to really make sure that I'm doing things right.

I need to drop down to the selection preview pop up window, and change it to gray scale. And that way, I can see a gray scale version of the mask, here inside the image window. So again, everything that's white will be selected. Everything that's black will not be selected. Gray represents regents in between. All right, so this looks pretty darn good, but we are missing a few blues here and there, as you can see as indicated by these black specs. And what you want to do is just shift drag over those like so, inside the image window, is probably the best way to work.

And after a little bit of shift dragging you should see that you've selected if anything. Too much of the image, because now we not only have all the blue stuff appearing white, which means that it will be selected. But a lot of this stuff over here, which is the neutral sort of whitish portion of the board, that's lighting up as well, and that means that it will be selected to some degree. But that's actually go to work out just fine, so click OK in order to create that selection online. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and zoom out. I'm doing this by control spacebar or Cmd spacebar clicking inside the image window.

I want just this region down here, to be selected, I don't want any of the blue states, and I definitely don't want the south or the midwest or anything else. And that means I need to find the intersection of this current selection, add a new one I'm' about to draw. Using the Polygonal Lasso tool, so go ahead and click, and hold on the Lasso tool icon and choose the Polygonal Lasso from the fly-out menu. Now because I want to find the inner section of a couple of selections, I want to press a couple of keys, and those keys are Shift+Alt here on a PC, or Shift+Opt on the Mac.

And you will notice, if you're working along with me, a little x. Next to the horned polygonal lasso cursor, and that tells you that you're about to find the intersection. So, go ahead and Shift+Alt click or Shift+Option click on the Mac. And then regardless of your platform, you can release all the keys. So now that you've clicked, you've initiated the selection; and you've told Photoshop you want to find the inner section. Now, just go ahead and click in order to create corners in your polygon generously around this western region. But don't go through Hawaii, or any of the other states.

Leave them alone. And, then I'll just, kind of, click around up here, like so. I don't want to select the blue inside the politic space. So. I'll avoid it. And, I also want to avoid this border over here. So, I'll click, at this location, click down, left, right there. And, then click over here, lets say. And, then around, through the word state, will work just fine. When you get back to the beginning of your selection, notice that you'll see a little circle next to the cursor, at which point, go ahead and click. And now we've got the intersection of those two, selected regions.

All right, now we want to fill that area with blue. And the best way to do that is to drop down to the black white circle icon, at the bottom of the layers panel. And if you want to name the layer as you make it, press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac, before you click on the cursor, and then choose solid color from the top of the list. Because you have the alt or Option key down, you'll see the new layer dialog box, and which point you can call the layer blue, or what have you, and click ok. And now notice that Photoshop goes in and automatically converts the selection into a layer mask.

At this point, I've seen kind of this weird shade of blue right here. And that is a function of the color range Cmd. It actually lifts foreground colors as you work. So that's the last color upon which I shift clicked, or drag or what have you. That's not really the color I'm looking for. So I'm going to click inside, let's say, Utah, in order to lift its blue. And that gives me a hue value of 201. I'll just round it down to 200 degrees. Notice that the saturation value is cranked up to 100%. We're going to be applying a Contrast Mode Overlay.

Once again, In just a moment which will increase the saturation of the colors as well, so we need to take the saturation value down, to 50%. And I'll go ahead and set the brightness value to 50% as well. So 250 and 50 for the HSB values, and then click OK, in order to create that color. Now we've got a couple of problems, one of which is this region of flat blue doesn't look right at all, doesn't blend in with the image, and of course we've got some bad selection edges going. So to take care of the first problem, go ahead and click on the word normal in the upper left corner of the layers panel, and choose overlay, and we're going to apply the overlay blend mode.

And you can see that does a real nice job on that blue field, so we have some nice integration of the new blue with the old. But if I zoom in to make this even more clear, you can see that we still have this rotten edge right there. To get rid of it, Double-click on an empty portion of this blue layer. So, out here beyond the word blue, Double-click, and that'll bring up the Layer Style dialog box. Drop down to the Underlying Layer slider right there. And I'm going to move this dialog box over, so we can see what happens. Keep an eye on this blue junk right there on there on top of the mustard word, state.

And notice if I drag that white slider triangle to the left, all the way until the value above it reads 160. You can see that all of that extra blue that was affecting the background drops away. And we don't even have to create any transition there. We can just do a hard drop at 160. And this means that any luminous level that's 160 or brighter will show through the layer of blue. And, of course, that includes all of the various luminous levels associated with that neutral white.

Of the board, all right, now I'll go ahead and click OK in order to apply that change. So, just once again so you can see it, this is before we applied. So, I press Ctrl+C or Cmd+C on the Mac, and then if I press that keyboard shortcut again, this is the after version of the image. Now presumably you just want to do a little bit of touch up here and there, to get of some of the blotches, and you would do that by pressing Ctrl+shift+N, or Cmd+shift+N on a mac, to bring up the new layer dialog box. I'll call it clean up, and click OK. And then I'll go ahead and switch to the spot healing brush.

You want to turn on the sample all layers check box up here in the options bar. Make sure that content aware is active. And you can use the right bracket key in order to enlarge your cursor a little bit. And then just click at various locations, so this way we're doing some. Non-destructive healing, because after all we are healing too an independent layer. So, I'm just going to go ahead and click around some of these regions, not here, because that's not really going to work well. Notice if I try to brush, well actually that worked out just fine. Just make sure that you avoid that edge right there.

What can go wrong? I'll show you. As I just brush closer to that edge like so, and then it's going to kind of bleed out a little bit. Anyway, I will undo and just reapply that guy there. And that should work out pretty well. And actually that isn't working out so well this time. All right, I'll show you another way to work in a moment. And then I'll just go ahead and brush over here. Now we have, notice right there, we've got kind of a mark that I want to address. And right next to that circle too, we've got that sort of highlight spot that I want to fix. I'm going to just fix a couple of other spots by kind of dragging around with the spot healing brush and now we want to switch to the standard healing brush.

So click and hold on the spot healing brush icon, select the healing brush tool, and then go ahead and press the Alt key or the Option key on a mac to specify a source for this tool, and I'm going to Alt or Option click right about there. Let's say. And now we'll release the alter option key. And I've got a problem here which is that I want to sample not the current layer, I want to sample all layers. So I'll go ahead and select all layers up here in the options bar. And then I should see a preview inside of my cursor that shows me that I want to start dragging right about there let's say and then proceed inward.

And then I'll go ahead and release right about there, and let Photoshop do its thing in order to heal that section of the image. And then I'll go up here and I want to do the same, I want to match the edge in other words of this home state space. So I'll go ahead and Alt click or Option click right about there, kind of at the bottom of that circle even though it's kind of rotated as you can see. And then I'll begin dragging right there, looks like a good match over, and if the match doesn't end up working out to well, just press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on a Mac to undo it.

Make sure aligned is turned off up here in the options bar, and then you can go ahead and try that again, and this time around I've got a better match. Although I do have a new problem that I introduced there, so I'll just go ahead and switch back to the spot healing brush tool. And go ahead and brush that little guy away. And of course you can spend as much or as little time on this as you like. But in any event, that's how it works. We'll go ahead and Alt click or option click on the I in front of the board game layer.

This is the original version of that reflected glare. Pretty remarkable actually and then if I alter option click on the eyeball again, that is the restored version of the blue field, thanks to our ability to apply all kinds of photographic restorations, here inside Photoshop. All right, so we've done a pretty good job of getting rid of the glare in that blue field. In the lower left corner of the board game. But the individual spaces still have a ton of glare on them. Which is why, if you are a member of the lynda.com online training library, I devote a total of two follow up movies.

Two ways in which we can restore those spaces to good health. And of course, these techniques work when restoring all kinds of elements of a digital photograph whether they're spaces in a board game, or otherwise. If you're waiting for next week's free movie, I'm going to show you how to merge two different camera raw exposures of a single scene in order to create this dramatic landscape right here. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.