Lens flare question.

[Bill Koenig]

I'm working on a pano project that was taken at night. I'm having trouble with lens flare in the tree branches.
With all of the fine detail, I'm running out of ideas on how to deal with this?  
Any ideas?

[MarkM]

I would probably work in this order:

Re-shoot if possible with a lens hood or flag.

Since it's a tree, you probably don't care about fidelity of the detail. You can do pretty amazing things using content aware fill on a copied layer and then faking the rest with cloning. If it's a small part of a larger pano, this will be pretty easy to pass off. Any old random tree branches will work so long as you don't leave them disconnected.

If you REALLY want to work it, you might look at the channels and notice that that green channel is pretty flare-free. You can use something like the Channel Mixer  to copy area of the green channel onto the red and green to and then adjust the color. You could use the blue channel to make a mask of the flared areas, which might help I think this will be pretty difficult to do convincingly, but I think it's possible.

Of course re-shooting would be easier and maybe create a better result assuming you can do it without getting the flare.

Seems like a time-consuming fix if you're trying to make a really clean image.

[Paul2660]

Flare like that, I don't think even content aware can remove.  It will also remove the tree branches.  Best to try to re-shoot as mentioned in the previous post.  When I get areas like this, I have tried using a selection mask in CC and pulling down the magenta or red in the selection, it may alter the color of the sky in the background, but may help some.  Make sure you use "refine" edge to feather the edge which will help in the blend. 

I use the Nikon 14-24 at night and it will often pull a lot flare if I don't use a "flare buster".  You can pick these up at B&H photo and they mount to the flash bracket of the camera.

Paul 

[Bill Koenig]

Thanks for the reply's.
Unfortunately the trees now have leaves, so a re shoot isn't possible, but I didn't mention that this was going to be black & white in the end. I've looked at the channels, and I think that a mask might be the way to go, and combine that with careful cloning.  
 Any time spent will be worth it as I've all ready have at least 20 hours in this project. This pano is made up of 60 images with 3 vertical columns 10 degrees apart, and rotated 5 degrees horizontal, 85mm Nikkor lens @f8, with 3 exposures per image for HDR.
This pano is a down town city street taken late at night. There are NO car's headlights, NO cars anywhere in the picture at all by design, this made for a long night (over two hours) to shoot this, and I've already re shot parts of it 4 times now. There many street lights with lots of flare, but having a lot of overlap (50%) has allowed me to edit out most of the flare using masks made from adjacent shots, because of the rotation of the panohead, the axis of the lens changes just enough to eliminate the flare in adjacent shots, but in this frame, there isn't anything to make a mask from.

BTW, Its just a hobby.

[Paul2660]

B&W will make it easier to work out for sure.  You also might be able work it better in the separate color channels a bit before you convert to B&W. 

Paul

[darlingm]

Unfortunately the trees now have leaves, so a re shoot isn't possible. . .

Obviously, the easiest solution is to pick all the leaves off.  :-P

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)