Hello all,

A friend of mine sent me the attached photo and asked if I can remove the White eyes and hot spots from the lamps which I failed horribly at. Would someone here be able to do that for me? I'm not familiar at all with white eye removal, thank you and much appreciated!

my attempt
only for the eyes
plus some color enhancement

Just use the Resynth Heal tool for the hotspots of lighting.

I tried the resynth, Mahvin. I know that I am no expert with that tool, but I could not get the colors to match up and got weird areas in it because their heads are so close to the border.

Clone tool would work, too.

Sorry to be a pain, Mahvin but I tried the clone tool too, and Smudge. I'm not expert to get a good result doing it that way. Just made a mess!

If one of our photo experts does not have some majic, if it were my photo I would probably cut out the people, fix the wall (hopefully from a photo of the same wall with no obstructions and then put the people back in. A lot of work.

Working on it now. Running a white balance on the image, then we'll see what happens...

I'm going to step out and agree with Ofnuts on images like this one. Sometimes, you just have to accept the fact the only way to get improvement is take a better picture. I've gone as far as creating layer masks and blended the back wall to have more of a solid texture, however, due to the overall lighting in the image, it produces counter effects no matter how you try to tidy it up. I'd go as far as just removing the people from the image and placing them into another background scene, if it had to come right down to using this picture. I'll post my results at a later time, it's been a long day for me.

dinasset has done a superb job with the eyes, it would be a pity not to try to improve the rest of the image.

I don't think it is possible to remove the light flare, but perhaps I have moderated it somewhat and a fairly severe crop perhaps helps!

david.

I had a go at the eyes . Could not get the burnt out area to tone down.
I agree with David. Good work everyone who tried.
Gave it a bit more contrast as well. I have found that if you do not have at least 1 pixel of white or light colour in the eyes they look dead. I was unable to upload it back to here so here is the link to where I uploaded it.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/115367823 ... ed-public/
Forgot about the 'attach' mode. Hmmmmmmmmmmm wouldn't upload that way either.

I just replaced the entire wall. It's not the most delicate of work, but the idea is clearly defined. PNG file was too big to load on here.

Nice job mahvin

Yes, Mahvin, a very good job!

The easiest and quickest way to get the outline of the people for masking purposes is to:

1. Run Colors - Levels and totally reverse white and black channels



2. Adjust brightness and contrast a tad to rein in the white outlines and make them crisper



3. Desaturate the image so its black and white.

4. Using a hard brush, with color set to black, work around the white outlines, painting with short strokes (to prevent from losing work when undoing) like shown:


Now you have a mask you can add to any image.

Thanks for that tut I will try and print it out today if I get time.

Mahvin, I'm a little lost. If I copy the mask and put it into another image, how do you get the proper color back into the image that was covered by the mask?

The mask is only good for the actual image you are working on. I just duplicate the image and run the mask via black at the top. I didn't mean you could use the same mask across different images (you actually could if it were like text and you wanted to create unique effects with images). In this case, the mask is only good for the image it came from. The mask selection is what helps you remove or change the background.

...hmmm it seems that the author of the request is not much interested in the proposed solution(s).
I guess Mahvin's way fits the requirements

It is really a big help to me, though, as I have some pics stashed away that I could never fix. Now I will dig them out and give it a try!