Before
Last Christmas when I was in Melbourne I captured what I thought was a decent shot but my Tokina 11-16mm Wide Angle Lens has some lens flare issues. This photo which I took at first glance looks like a complete loss. However with only a few edits in Photoshop and Lightroom I was able to rescue the photo.
Once I loaded the image in Photoshop, I drew rough Selections as shown below and Feather the selection by 30px. I then applied an Adjustment Layer of Curves and darkened the selection. This got rid of all the Noise and Lens flare.
Apply Feather and Curve to Darken
Finally, once the image came back into Lightroom 5 I applied some local adjustments using an Adjustment Brush with small increase in Exposure and Shadows. I applied these adjustments to the areas highlighted below.
Lightroom Brush Edit
After
And that’s it the image is now looking more meaningful and something worth keeping. There are a couple of lens flares on the right side of the base of the clock tower but I kind of liked them there so I didn’t remove them.
So no heavy Clone or Healing needed on this image, keeping it simple saved me so much time and produced a much better result. Finally the image was cropped to remove the road.
Xmas in Melbourne
