Best way to remove glare

[Muzician]

I've got a photo of a painting that has an irregularly shaped glare reflection. I've been getting decent results using the Free Select tool and mild stages of brightness/contrast reduction on progressively smaller areas of the image to avoid an obvious border where the filter has been applied but wondering if there's a better, quicker more effective way to do it. 

Thanks!

[sallyanne]

can you upload your photo or part thereof? A few of us will try then and tell you how we would did it

[Muzician]

(12-20-2022, 06:04 AM)sallyanne Wrote: can you upload your photo or part thereof?  A few of us will try then and tell you how we would did it

Thanks. Here's a sample of the original and what I've got going so far using the free select and brightness/contrast as described in the OP.

[sallyanne]

slipped my mind completely that it was a photo of a 'painting'
Too much messing with that will ruin the painting texture. Looks like what you are doing is ok
But, I suggest when you free select give it a reasonably large feather (about 50), so you do not end up with 'borders' of your selection

[Muzician]

(12-20-2022, 07:36 AM)sallyanne Wrote: slipped my mind completely that it was a photo of a 'painting'
Too much messing with that will ruin the painting texture. Looks like what you are doing is ok  
But, I suggest when you free select give it a reasonably large feather (about 50), so you do not end up with 'borders' of your selection

Thanks!

[denzjos]

This is what I tried  :
Made a copy from the layer with layer mode 'Multiply'
Colours / Color grading
Select the glare, colorise it and use the levels / curves to color correct the selection (still need some color correction)
   
   

[Muzician]

(12-20-2022, 01:06 PM)denzjos Wrote: This is what I tried  :
Made a copy from the layer with layer mode 'Multiply'
Colours / Color grading
Select the glare, colorise it and use the levels / curves to color correct the selection (still need some color correction)

Thanks - I'll check it out!

[Muzician]

As a follow-up I ended up having my cousin take more pics under different lighting conditions. The insurmountable problem is that even with the glare reduced the details and color were obliterated.

But there are things about the glare pic I like better such as the color of the area under the pot and the way the texture of the paint on the flowers stands out because of the way the light catches it, but the background of the painting and green areas of the flowers are nicer under the re-do pics.

So what I'm doing is going in a different direction with efforts on this project - I'm making surgical use of the Free Select tool and cutting out various parts and layering and blending them with varying opacity and making a Frankenpicture, using the perspective tool to make tiny adjustments so the layers match up exactly.

It would have been a lot less work if I had access to the paintings and could take photos of them carefully lined up on the paintings with the right kind of diffused, even light with a proper camera on a tripod or mount but have to go with the circumstances at hand.

[Ofnuts]

Getting a uniform lighting on this kind of object is quite difficult and requires some lightin gear. Or you wait for some overcast day, take the painting outdoors and shoot.

[Muzician]

(12-23-2022, 10:09 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: Getting a uniform lighting on this kind of object is quite difficult and requires some lightin gear. Or you wait for some overcast day, take the painting outdoors and shoot.

Yeah, I wish I had access to the paintings - they're several states away. I've discovered my cousin has some mobility issues that I didn't know about and getting the paintings off the wall is a bit of a chore for her and to be honest she's not the one to do it - she's a sweetie but not a hands-on, figure it out and get it done right kind of person and has a limited frustration threshold. She couldn't even find the settings on the camera function to figure out how to adjust the resolution. I just got lucky that it was already set to a pretty large resolution. Fooling around with software like I'm doing just seems like black magic to her.