Easiest way to remove glare from a photo?

This isn't the usual question one runs into just to create clothing. The reason is because I'm diverging slightly with a project a friend of mine needs help with.

She is a prolific artist. We're working on opening a gallery where she can sell her work in-world. Supply of original, unique pieces is never-ending due to her proflicacy

Most of her stuff has been sent to me as digital photos of the piece itself -- and most of that is tweakable enough in Photoshop to work the contrast/brightness and sharpen enough to make the final result acceptable inside Second Life.

But there are enough pieces where off-camera glare has distorted one corner of the piece that I would like to use Photoshop to level the light ambience across the photo (or just darken it in that area) rather than make her shoot the pics all over again.

After an hour or so of fiddling with Photoshop and NOT knowing what the heck I'm doing, the best I could do is either select that corner arbitrarily and darken it, or alter the light level over the entire photo to the point that it wasn't as noticeable. But it's still noticeable.

Surely a high-powered photo manipulation tool like this has a way to non-arbitrarily smooth the light level across an image?

Help?

I think your answer lies in Image > Adjustments > Levels (dont use auto-levels, it sucks)

Here is an explanation.

Play with the sliders there and see if that helps... in particular the sldier on the right, under the white part of the gradiant (adjusts the levels of white toward black)

You might also try the Dodge and Burn tools to adjust just the areas with too much glare.

Can you post an example picture for me to experiment with?

-Ghoti

Ghoti, thank you for the pointer, I'll try that out!

I'm afraid I can't post a sample here. My friend's artwork is hers and I don't have her permission to copy it. But I can probably figure this out even if I make her retake some of the photos.

Hope the tips help.

-Ghoti

It's not as simple as "smoothing the light level across the image". Your definition of "light" is quite a bit different from what Photoshop thinks "light" means. Let me explain.

You're thinking naturally as a three-dimensional being who lives in a three-dimensional world. You know that your image is a photograph of a real object, you know that the light reflecting off of that object and into the camera came from an external source, and you know that that source could be moved, focused, or otherwise manipulated at will in order to affect the way the object looks. But Photoshop doesn't know any of these things. All it knows is that it's been given a collection of pixels arranged in a certain order, and that each of those pixels has its own color & brightness values. It has no idea that externally generated light exists. As far as it's concerned, the amount of what we three-dimensional beings call light on a surface is nothing more than a pixel by pixel amount of hue, saturation, and value. There is no "surface" and there is no "light". To Photoshop, all there is in the whole world is horizontal, vertical, color, and brightness. That's it.

This is why photographers and retouchers make a lot of money. It takes artistry to produce quaility photos. No amount of automated button pushing will ever change that. Owning Photoshop doesnt make one a better retoucher any more than owning a good brush makes one a better painter. Were you to simply let the software do all the work by telling Photoshop to even out the amount of "lightness" and "darness" across the whole canvas, believe me you would not like the results. Photoshop might be proud of the way it looks, but you wouldn't. It takes a human touch to make things look right to a human.

So, to solve your problem, I'd suggest one (or both) of 2 things:

1. Take better photographs under better lighting conditions.

2. Here is an excellent collection of Quicktime tutorials for Photoshop. The one you want is about 2/3 of the way down the list, entitled "removing glare and the addition of a polarize effect." I'd recommend watching all of them though. Keep in mind these were filmed with an older version of Photoshop, but the principles are the same. Also, the scope of that one movie is limited to removing glare from faces and eyeglasses, but you can adapt the techniques to your purposes.

Good luck.

Unfortunately they're not my photos, or even my artwork. I did ask if she could retake some of the pics with better lighting.


Thank you Chosen -- ironically, after I went home for lunch I'd found that link myself and watched that exact tutorial, as well as reading a few others that discussed removing glare. Obviously my work is cut out for me. I'm lucky insofar as these aren't supposed to be 3D objects I'm trying to preserve, but simply colors that I need to enhance. That makes the process a little easier.