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There’s no doubt that sometimes it's neccessary to fix those little nuances that plague digital photos, especially those taken indoors with a point-and-shoot camera.
Flash spots occur when the flash from the camera reflects back from the person’s face or a reflective object in the background. Suffice to say, flash spots are unflattering. They make the photo look over-exposed and take away from the overall aesthetic of the image, or they add too much shine to your subject’s face. Follow along to find out how to use Photoshop’s default filters to make your point-and-shoot photos look cleaner. You can also use this tutorial for airbrushing.
Original image:
1. Point your cursor over to Image – Adjustments – Curves (or you can hit the shortcut, Ctrl + M). We’re going to use the curves to adjust the lighting in our photo.
With your mouse, click on the center-most point of the grid and drag it downward to diminish the lighting in the picture. Conversely, moving the curve upwards will increase the exposure of your image, causing it to look washed out. We want the image to be a bit dimmer than the original to remove the sheen from our subject’s face.
2. Duplicate the layer; you can do so by right clicking and selecting Duplicate Layer. Uncheck the visibility of your original image by clicking on the tiny eye icon next to it. We’ll be working with the duplicate to make all of our changes.
3. Go to Filter – Blur - Gaussian Blur and increase the radius only slightly until the shiny spots begin to fade away. Be careful not to blur out the entire photo.
4. Now, we want to bring back some texture to the image, especially if we want any semblance of human skin on your subjects. Go back to Filter and select Noise – Add Noise. Make sure Gaussian is selected and Monochromatic is unchecked.
Decrease the percentage so that it doesn’t look like rainbow speckles. Click okay, and now you have your base image, which we will fuse with our original to remove the flash spots.
5. Activate the original layer by clicking on the small eye icon. Select the eraser tool, pick a brush size, and make sure to turn down the hardness to zero percent in the brushes dialogue box. The master diameter of your brush really depends on the picture and the person featured in the picture; you want to make sure that you don’t use too big of a brush.
This is what the brush tool dialogue box looks like.
6. Touch up the areas that you see the flash spots, doing so slightly by sponging the area with your brush. Be careful not to remove too much when you’re removing flash spots from human faces as you could lose depth, causing your subjects to look flat (and fake!). Remember to zoom in and fix miniscule areas like gums and teeth, just for posterity.
Final product:
Comments are closed on this article
dracx619
July 21, 2010 at 3:19am
f#!$ off douchelord! no one cares and no one here is stupid enough to click or look at any of your links!
dentaku
March 20, 2009 at 6:00pm
I saw a few little OSX screenshots (probably old stuff they got from somewhere else) and all the rest where Vista.
smashingpumpin
March 11, 2009 at 8:37pm
umm k, great tips! now where's the part to make fake celebs? lol
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Darth Ninja
March 11, 2009 at 8:33pm
Kind of funny, but am I the only one that thinks the final image looks worse then the starting one for the "Remove Flash Spots" bit?
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DarthNinja
www.DarthNinja.com
knexkid
March 11, 2009 at 2:58pm
Tip number 3:
Use Level Adjustments and Color Correction to bring an photo to lifeAn photo? An hero? An computer? An elephant? Ahh, there we go....
great article though!
Marcus_Soperus
March 11, 2009 at 11:23am
In recent versions, Photoshop Elements has been revved up so it can perform almost all of the tips in this article. You will need to use a different selection tool for cutting out an object (such as magnetic lasso) and PSE lacks Actions,, but other stuff like adjustment layers (kudos for mentioning this) are in both PSE and its full-powered sibling. In PSE, you can use the File menu's option to process multiple photos to perform resizing or conversion to other formats.
BTW, if you use multiple adjustment layers, you can really change how the finished photo works by changing layer order.
BTW #2: if you want to print your newly-improved creations at a photofinishing kiosk or online printing service, stick with maximum-quality JPEG; these services usually don't understand other formats.
Thanks for the article!
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It's amazing how illogical a business built on binary logic can be.
xveganx
March 11, 2009 at 10:23am
"Create an Action Script to resize a large batch of photos"
is there a way to do this with the GIMP?
MAXPCreader07
March 11, 2009 at 8:51am
This seems like great tips except I use The GIMP not Photoshop.
Keith E. Whisman
March 11, 2009 at 10:35am
Have you ever heard of Gimp Shop? It's supposed to be TheGimp but with all the looks and feel of Photoshop and I have heard that it also has the same functionality so that if you really know photoshop then GimpShop will be second nature. So I would assume all these features will work but I don't know as I use neither. I just push the button on my camera and hope for the best.
sinan
March 11, 2009 at 8:48am
I always did things the hard way in photoshop. I always meant to look up some tutorials to learn some useful tricks but never found the time or was too intimidated. These are neat little things to do.
Anyone knows of a good site with such tutorials that I can check out?
Thanks
dracx619
March 11, 2009 at 11:58am
tutorialoutpost.com
thats where i learned photoshop almost 6 years ago
