Remove flash spots

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: