A common problem if you're a landscape photographer
And you like to shoot into the Sun is that you often get lens flare and you can see a couple of examples here
I've got flare here on the clouds and I could get rid of that using the clone tool
But when I get over here
The flare on the trees is quite severe and I've also got a little bit of flare coming off here at the edge. I
Could spend a lot of time with the clone tool trying to remove this and fix it and sometimes it works
Sometimes it looks a bit messy now
there is an easier way to fix this and I'll show you how what you need to do though is
Remember to take a second photograph at the same time as the first one. I'll show you what I mean
Here is my second photograph and it's just the same as the first one except for one difference
It's got my finger in the way now
You have used my finger to cover up the Sun and as soon as you do that you remove the lens flare from the image
So there's the original with the flare and there's the next picture I took without the flare
Now what we can do is combine the two together in Photoshop
but first what you need to do in Lightroom or whatever photo editor you're using is
Make the two images look similar in terms of tones
So if you look at the trees area here that I'm trying to cover up
It's very similar now in terms of brightness and darkness as the other image
so the
Adjustments are applied to one raw file. Also get applied to the other and then I tweak them just to make them look identical
I'm now going to right click on the images and choose to edit them in Photoshop
But rather than just editing Photoshop, I'm going to choose the option down here to open them as layers in Photoshop
Here I am in Photoshop and whilst I've chosen to use
Photoshop you can use any editing tool that supports layer masks now
We've got our image opened and it's got two layers in it
We've got the top layer which has the flare on and we've got the bottom layer with my finger
What I need to do though is reverse this
So I'm just going to take this top layer and I'm going to drag it and drop it. So it's below the other layer
The reason for this is that this image with the flare is my base layer
It's my good layer that I'm then going to build on
what I need to do next is add a layer mask to this second image and
I'm now going to invert that to turn it black and that hides everything
All I have to do now is select my brush tool. I'm going to set the opacity
Probably around 50% tattoo is quite good. I've got white selected and
I'm also going to create a soft edge to the brush
And the reason for that is it will blend my adjustment quite subtly and you won't be able to see it
I'm now going to brush over where the flare is whilst. I've got the mask selected
So I just change the size of my paintbrush
I don't want to brush in too much and there were a couple of strokes and that area there is being fixed
Over to the edge here. I
just brush over twice and it's fixed and
I can brush over this area here and
That's also fixed
if I turn off the layer you
Can see the flare for turning it back on the fly is gone and if I turn off the bottom layer
You can see the adjustment that's been painted in
This is really simple and easy technique to use if you're out in the
Landscape and you're struggling to shoot into the Sun because of a flare
You just have to remember to take our second image with your finger in the way
Now the secret to really making this work well and making it easy to combine the images if you use a tripod
The two images need to be very similar to each other and that means you don't want to leave a lot of time
Between them and you want them to be?
Identical in terms of framing the tripods going to help you to do that
Now as I say you don't need to leave a lot of time between taking the two shots and that's to minimize any
Movements such as clouds if you've got movement and you're trying to combine the images in an area that showing movement
You're not going to be able to do it
The other secret is to make the two images as near to each other in terms of color and tone as possible
That way when you blend the two together in certain areas, you're not going to see the joint. I hope you found this useful
There's lots more tutorials like this. If you visit my website, I'll put the details below in the information
I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft. I'll see you next time for another video