When a bright light source such as the sun shines directly into a camera lens, flare and flare artifacts are often formed, such as the red doughnut near the centre of Fig. 1. For decades slide film shooters had to either forego such a shot or toss it; now in the digital era we have other options.

The easiest way to remove the red donut in Fig. 1 is to do a bit of cloning from a neighbouring area. In many cases, however, there is no similar area to clone from, so we'll go through the exercise of removing the red doughnut to learn the technique:

Example 1 – red doughnut

To follow along: right click on Fig. 1, download the full scale image, then open it in Photoshop (most any version will do):

1. Lasso flare object then feather slightly.

2. Open Curves dialogue, choose closest matching colour channel, then create a curve that comes closest to removing flare colour.

3. Still in the Curves dialogue, go back to RGB channel and create curve that cancels as much of any brightness or darkness difference between the flare artifact and the surrounding area.

4. Use history brush at low opacity to undo any area that goes too far.

Repeat steps 1 through 4 for any areas not fully fixed by first iteration.

Example 2 – sun ray

Another example of flare artifacting in Fig. 1 are the rays rediating from the rising sun. I don't consider them offensive, but we'll remove a segment of one to show that this technique works just as well in areas in which detail exists but has been obscured.

1. Lasso the offending flare area, then feather a small amount, such as 5 pixels.

2. Use the same procedure as in steps 2 - 4 above.

We're not done yet; go to page 2 – where the fun really begins.