HOW TO...
Remove Glare
with
Photoshop Elements
essential-photoshop-elements.com

Rick Peterson: Hey, this is Rick essential-photoshop-elements.com. In this video, we are going to remove the strong glare from the outside of the crystal on this watch. The first thing, I want to do is duplicate my background layer. So I'm just going to drag it down on to that create a new layer icon. And now I'm going to make a selection of the glare area, so I'm going to grab my Zoom Tool and click a couple times to zoom up, so we can see what we are doing a little better. And for this selection, I'm going to use the Magic Wand Tool and I'm going to change my tolerance setting up in the options bar to 32.

And now I'm just going to click on the area I want to select and that selected a lot of the area, but I want to add to my selection to get more, so I'm going to hold down the Shift key and watch my cursor you can see there is a little plus sign that appears. That means I'm going to add to my selection, when I click next. So I'm still holding down the Shift key and I'm just going to click, couple more areas that actually looks pretty good. Let me see if I can get this area little better and I'm going to hold down Shift again and click.

Okay, get those it's a little rough around the edges, but that's okay we can smooth that out. I'm going to go up to my select menu and choose Feather and I'm going to add 2 pixels feather to the selection. Okay, now I want to create Levels Adjustment layer. So go down to the create a new adjustment layer icon, click on that and choose Levels. Now in the Levels adjustment window, I'm going to go to the output levels down at the bottom here and grab this white slider on the right and start to move that over to the left and you will see that my selected area will get darker which is what we want.

Maybe about there I'm going to go up to my histogram, if I grab my Midtone slider and drag it over to the right, my selection will get darker still. Let's go to about, maybe about here and now if I grab my Shadow slider it will make it even darker, so slide that over till it looks good maybe about there and click the eyeball off and on, you can see we already made a significant improvement. But there is still some reflection showing up around here to get rid of that I'm going to use the Burn Tool. So go over to your Toolbox and you might have the Dodge Tool visible like I do here.

If you click on the Dodge Tool it will reveal the other nested tools under there and there you will find the Burn Tool and we'll just see how that works. If you need to adjust your brush size, you can always do that with the left and right bracket keys but the size looks pretty good for me and now I'm going to select my background copy layer. So, I'm just going to go around on all these highlight areas in between and just click and drag to burn those a little darker. Just go all the way around the watch. Actually, I think up in this area I'm going to leave it as it is because it looks like it could just be part of the watch face. I will just burn this area a little bit more maybe down here some more.

Now one other thing I want to do is I want to bring back some of the brightness of the numbers where I can so the 12 and the 6, these 5 minute indicator marks on the watch face. So to do that I need to go back up to my Levels layer and on my layer mask I'm going to paint with black to let those areas come back through. So I have black in my foreground color. I will just grab my paint brush and trace around this number 6 and you can see that brings back some of the lightness of that number. And now for these five minute increment lines I'm going to click once, hold my Shift key down and go to the other end of the line and click. And what that does is just brings back those areas again.

Now I'm going to go around to all the other five minute increments and do the same thing. I'm going to start at one end, click, hold down my Shift key and click on the other end to brighten them up. These appear, I don't think I need to do this one make darker. Now this one I'm going to start on the inside and then I will just click up that way and maybe I will do the same here. So let's go back down to 100% view to get an idea of how all this looks. We can do that by double clicking on the Zoom Tool. And now if I hold down the option key and click on my background layer we can see here before and after. Well there is one way that you can get rid of the glare on a watch face or anything else you need to get rid of it and it also works well for eye glasses. My name is Rick, from essential-photoshop-elements.com, go to my website and you can find a lot more useful information for photoshop elements. Until next time, take care.