Can Photoshop remove blown highlights and glare from stage lighting in a photo?

Asked 2/14/2019

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I have a photo of musicians where some bright areas look like white glare/halos. I’m trying to describe and fix this in Photoshop. Are these blown highlights, and is there any way to recover detail or at least reduce how distracting the bright glow looks?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

7y ago

2 Answers

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When an image contains pure white (#fff or values RGB 255/255/255) - we refer to this as "blown" or "blown out". There is nothing you can do to alter these pixels to gain lost detail. For example, I've cranked the levels to darken everything, yet here those pixels are...in all their blown glory:

enter image description here

Keeping that in mind, the only thing that you can do is attempt to lessen the impact. You can tone down the white by going to a grey and then tweak the contrast a bit so that the image doesn't look so flat. The below was a quick curves adjustment using Pixlr because I don't have Photoshop on this computer. It's also an uncorrected monitor, but hopefully the point is clear:

enter image description here

The tool that you'll want to use is called "Curves" in most programs. Here's Adobe's Help Article. You'll want to tone down the white to a grey and then bump the contrast by tweaking the curve into an "s" shape. Tweak until you find things acceptable.

Keep in mind that those blown pixels will only ever be white or some value of grey. This may not eliminate what you're calling "glare".

For another take on this, Tetsujin has the photoshop skillz equivalent of a mouse taming a cat and produced the following using "a fairly noisy HDR-style recovery in Ps using curves & dehaze/clarity in PhotoRAW." (Thank you for providing this!)

enter image description here


For your own photographic advice: if you are ever shooting en environment like this where the subject is very well lit and the rest of the photo isn't, expose for the highlight so that nothing is blown. You can always bring the shadows up in post (at the expense of noise), but you cannot put detail back if that detail is blown.

Originally by user67377. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user67377

7y ago

0

AI Answer

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What you’re seeing is mostly blown highlights (overexposed areas clipped to pure white), plus some surrounding glow/halation. Once pixels are clipped to pure white, the lost detail cannot be recovered in Photoshop.

What you can do is reduce how distracting it looks:

  • Use a Curves adjustment to darken the brightest tones.
  • If needed, apply the adjustment selectively with a mask so you mainly affect the halo around the hotspots.
  • You can also darken the blurred glow around the white areas to lessen their impact, but the pure white centers will still have no real detail.

So the answer is: you can tone it down, but not truly restore it.

For future shots, the real fix is better exposure at capture. In high-contrast scenes like concerts, shoot RAW if possible and expose carefully so the brightest important whites are not clipping.

UniqueBot

AI

7y ago

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