Photo Restoration – Remove Reflection

This is my first photoshop tutorial (not the first article) in year 2009. In this tutorial I try to explain how to remove reflection because it’s important in photography. In photography sometimes moment is important than photo quality – I ever see someone still use his/her photo although the photo have many noises and sometimes the photo also not clear. For me, both (moment and quality) are important so I don’t want leave my photo unedited – sometimes I spend my time to correct some photos.

Photo that I use here comes from Retouchpro website. Someone ask to correct this photo – sorry I forget to bookmark the link.

The moment in that photo is very good – but you can see reflection that a little bit distracting the photo. In this photo noise also a big problem that I need to correct. Since my main topic in this tutorial is remove reflection so I just focus to write the way to remove reflection.

My step  to remove reflection:

1. Open the photo

2. Try to remove reflection in background by using tools. I like to use combination  of stamp tool and patch tool. Using stamp tool in noisy photos will produce ‘not good’ result so try to use patch tool after using stamp tool. Don’t forget to choose appropriate brush type, blend mode, brush size and hardness, and also opacity.

Remove reflection 1:

Remove reflection 2:

Remove reflection 3:

3. Remove reflection in clothes area. This a little bit tricky, if you use stamp tool and patch tool – the result is not very good. I use my own way to remove reflection in this part. My own way to correct this problem is very simple hehe….. check it.

Make a new layer, brush the clothes area by red color (you can use orange but I love red more):

Change blend mode to color:

Make a new layer and brush the clothes area by red color, add noise to simulate noise and gaussian blur to smooth the noise, change blend mode to darken:

Give a little correction to correct shadow problem:

4.  Remove reflection in hair area – the step similar with step 2.

Remove reflection in hair area:

5. Reduce noise, you can use any noise removal program to remove the noise.

Reduce noise:

6. Final adjustment – similar with my retouching tutorials, I like to add local contrast and sharpen the eye part. If you don’t know how to add local contrast and sharpen the eye please read my previous tutorial about retouching.

Final Adjustment:

You can see the final result here: (sorry for watermark) – I think this final result also not perfect because I work fast on this photo. Correct this photo perfectly needs time and also patience – for this tutorial I just show the way how to do it, the result depends on your patience.

Finally we finish this tutorial – I hope you can learn some ideas to remove reflection in your photo. As usual comments, suggestions, critiques are welcome.

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Tags: Photo, photo restoration, Photoshop, reflection, remove reflection, restoration, technique, tutorial

• January 2, 2009
• Photoshop
• 8 comments