Need Help Fixing a Picture - Flash Glare on Face

[tocof]

Greetings,

I primarily use Paint to edit photos. The work many of you do with Paint to create images is absolutely astounding...hope to have the time to learn that, but for now, it helps me to edit and clean up photographs.

I have a photograph that was taken at night of someones face fairly close and the flash creates a glare I would like to try to minimize. I have searched the forum for similar topics and found none. I have also been through all the 'Adjustments' and 'Effects' I currently have loaded, but haven't found anything that (based on my understanding) can help with this task.

Would greatly appreciate any ideas. Thanks.

Don

Edited December 21, 2010 by tocof

[yellowman]

It depends on how big and bright the shiny spots are, Clone tool works well, or cutting parts from the normal areas and paste them on the shiny area to cover them is another good method, use layers to do that.

If it is possible to post the photo here or part of it, and I am sure someone could help you.

Edited December 21, 2010 by yellowman

[tocof]

Hi,

Thanks for the response.

I did find a tool that I either missed or didn’t explore thoroughly…it’s in Effects>Photo>Shadow/Highlight Recovery. After playing with it a bit, I have posted the following Before/After picture and annotated the results. For purposes of this post and example, I maximized the setting to exaggerate its results.

An unexpected, but pleasant, effect of this tool is the B/A result in bringing out the lost detail in the shirt. The texture of the shirt was lost due to overexposure in the original pic, but was revealed by this tool. Also, in the second ‘After’ picture, I adjusted the ‘Shadow’ tool and it brought out the lost detail of the coat in the far shoulder (also noted). Overall, what really pleases me about this tool is that in making its adjustments, it leaves the majority of the photo unaffected, but does a nice job of zeroing in on the areas needing the manipulation.

One of the things that was interesting to me is that the ‘Basic’ Highlight adjustment provided better results in diminishing the highlights than the Advanced.

This tool gets rid of some of the ‘glare’ produced by the flash, but not all. Still curious if anyone using PDN has any other ‘tricks’ for getting any better results for eliminating the glare seen in this example.

[Sarkut]

Duplicate the image layer, turn it black-and-white, use Brightness/Contrast

to make a mask that is black except for the facial highlights.

Use black Paintbrush to cover shirt, eyes, hair highlight, etc.

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/1929/zam01.png

Remove the checkmark to make the mask layer not visible.

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Color pick a mid-tone face color, fill a new layer with that color above the original image.

Set the fill layer to Darken blending mode.

Apply the Alpha Mask Import plugin effect to the fill layer,

using the black-and-white layer as mask.

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/2672/zam02.png

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Use the Opacity slider to adjust how much the highlights are affected.

http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/2401/zam03.png