If eyes are the windows to the soul, eyeglasses can be the dust on the on the screen, with their reflective surfaces obscuring arguably the most important part of a portrait — the eyes.
Everyone has their own technique for removing glare from eyeglasses — I've personally made generous use of the clone stamp tool to achieve this — and Colin Smith at PhotoshopCAFE brings us a new technique in this tutorial. By making use of the camera raw filter in Photoshop, he's able to do much of the heavy lifting using a few sliders to reduce the haze of the reflection and match the skin tone and exposure of the area surrounding the eyes.
A few quick selections, a little free transform and a layer mask or two later, and the glare is virtually eliminated. As with many techniques in Photoshop, the amount and location of glare may influence the effectiveness of this technique compared to others, but it does achieve a more realistic effect than simply cloning.
How do you remove or reduce glare from eyeglasses in a portrait? Does Smith's technique work better for you? Drop a comment below and let us know what you think of this tutorial.
This. Or, often times, you can simply tilt them down enough to avoid glare by lifting the ear piece a tiny bit.
Helps with one person, but not group photos (3 and above)... at least I haven't figured it out yet (on groups). Have any techniques for people of 3 and above with glasses?
Aww, but then I won't be able to spend all of that extra time in post I so enjoy!
Remove glass (lenses)
Use a circular polarizer
CPLs only work well when the light source is 90 degrees from the camera. They quickly lose efficacy when the angle reduces, as the angle would be in most lighting setups for people. You can try to cross polarize both your light, and your lens, but that still will not solve the problem. Polarizers are not a magic fix all for reflections.
A helpful technique when you're matching a selection to the surrounding area is to duplicate the layer and add a regular layer mask. Hide the background layer and paint black to HIDE the area you want to affect. By doing this, you can very accurately select the area you want to change. Now INVERT the mask and toggle visibility of the background back on. Now you've got a selected area you can change while comparing it to the background.
Thanks for this. In a test it did make a significant improvement, but a long way from perfect and more work than I like. I'm wondering if one of the AI program makers is working on a package that knows it's a reflection on glasses and can automatically (subject to photographer refinements) make the full correction.