Removing Light from a Picture

[atharvj29837932]

How can i remove light from pictures like this?

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

That's not an easy fix.  First you'd have to recreate the blown pixels, and paint back in some of the skin tones and hair.  Then making new lights with oval selections and layer styles, is the easy part.  But some of it is so bad I couldn't even guess what to replace it with.

[davescm]

The worst is the face on the third person.

Sometimes is sufficient detail in the flare to recover it - in this case there is not. Sometimes you can rebuild one side of the face by flipping and transforming the other - in this case the flare runs diagonally and across the mouth - so that is not much use.

Do you have another pic from the same evening with better face detail. if so copying and transforming that into the pic will be the best bet for recovery. If you are careful with how you blend it, it can be quite successful. If you don't - then I'm afraid you are not going to get a decent pic.

Dave

[Trevor.Dennis]

I almost never work without a strobe on both cameras.  That's whether outside in bright sunlight, or inside under weak ambient using high ISO.  You can work magic with a dedicated speedlight even in extreme conditions like having the sun in the frame.  The image EXIF shows flash was set to -1 stop.  The camera was set to AV with no AEC, so it was all done automatically.   If your phone camera has a flash setting use it inside, or better still use a proper camera with a speedlite. 

Whoops, the room is shaking while I'm typing this.  Only a 4.0 is my guess.  We don't count anything less than a 5  😉

[atharvj29837932]

This is a clear picture of that guy. Can anything be done now?

[davescm]

Even that is not ideal as there is flare across that face.

As Trevor said - fill in flash/lighting helps. Even with a phone (which I suspect these pics are from) shading the lens with your hand also  clean the lens of smears . Finally look at the pic on the phone screen - if it is bad -retake it

As a bit of a rescue - use the camera raw filter dehaze and clarity on the background image. Mask the face from the other image and transform it over the old. Clone out the flare. You are not going to get this to look good starting with two bad images - but this may help you get started.

Dave