Episode 149: Lens Flares Ahead!

Every time you have a bright light shining into your lens you get a lens flare. This can look nice or horrible. You can avoid much of it with a lens hood – and with paying more money for better coated lenses.

But when you have these nasty spots on the image – there are ways in GIMP to heal them. Some are discussed in the forum thread where I also got the image for this show.

My preferred way to tackle a problem is to understand the source of it. Solving the problem is often much easier then. (This is the theory, often I just poke around…..;-) ) So I start with a bit of backboard – showing that a lens flare is only added light, The original image leis below and the flare can be (in theory) substracted from it.

In GIMP I do this with comparing similar coulours in and outside of the flare. A bit of layer magic and the flare is gone. Except for the fringe where my patience ran out.
The TOC

00:20 Greetings, Flattr
01:45 Lens flares
02:20 Origin of lens flares
12:10 Avoid lens flare with a lens hood and lens coating
13:05 “Digital” lenses
14:20 Solution: substract light
16:00 Curves to correct the contrast
19:45 Substracting light from the flare
19:45 How much light was added in the flare?
22:00 Sample points
23:05 Docking a dialogue
23:30 Mixing the correction colour
27:25 Correcting the second flare
33:00 Recap
35:15 A quick crop
36:30 Why layers?