Remove bright light from windows

[Vale22]

Hi, I have around 20 panoramic photos that I need to increase the colours and brightness (read about denoise, clarity, vibrance and saturation, curves and contrasts but could not find the right way), and the bright light from the windows makes my eyes heart.

Any suggestion on how to remove the bright light coming from the windows (even the ceiling lights have a powerful glow) and separately increase colours and quality in the rest of the photos?

I tried to select the windows and apply a separate brightness and contrast but it still didn't look good.  

Any suggestion of correct workflow to remove the bright light in Affinity Photo?

Thank you.

 

[Old Bruce]

The problem is that you have too much light coming in from the windows. You'll need to mask those and apply an exposure adjustment layer to it. I hav done a quick and nasty example, using the pen tool to make the selections and far too much of a reduction in the exposure.

[smadell]

The windows are so close to being blown out that I fear you will never get a result you’re happy with. If ever there was a case for bracketed photos, this might be it. Read about “real estate photogtaphy,” HDR, and (even better) Exposure Fusion techniques.

[jmwellborn]

 

Welcome to the Forums @Vale22 and Happy Easter! I am absolutely unqualified to give you a professional answer, such as @smadell, or @Old Bruce but if you are using Photo v. 1.9.2 (Mac) or the equivalent in Windows, you might try using the new Divide Blend Mode to take some of the sharpness out of those windows.  I fiddled with it until I discovered that you need to choose one of the grays in your image to dull the brightness of the windows.  At that point, I used a Sharpening Filter to make things a little more crisp.  The attached image shows the initial result. The attached file (including the history) was done in v. 1.9.2, so you wouldn't be able to open it on an earlier version of Photo.   I exported my result as a JPG and then on my 21" Mac (skinny 13" laptop was a bit squinty) I tried some Levels Adjustments and Curves Adjustments to work on the various colors.  One thing I discovered was that reducing the Output White Level to about 83% in the Levels Adjustment helped take more of the glare out of the ceiling lights.   I didn't work on the floor to ceiling windows.  But I have subsequently followed @Old Bruce's suggestion and used the Freehand Selection Tool to outline those windows and then applied the Exposure Adjustment with a reduced opacity.  This might give you some more ideas.

Using Divide Blend Mode.afphoto

[jmwellborn]

@Vale22  Thought of something else you might be able to try.  I used the Selection Brush Tool to isolate the parts of the image that I wanted to keep as they are, using the Quick Mask to work around the tiny bright bits near the doors, then inverted the selection and used FILTERS>BLUR>Depth of Field Blur and dragged the radius until I had muted the overhead lights.  I found a few remaining bits that were still too bright, so I just repeated the process, this time using the Selection Brush Tool at a very small setting with the Quick Mask to go over those bits again (In the second image I had still missed two.  SubsequentlyI repeated the Blur>Depth of Field two more times on those two.)   I then inverted the selection a second time so that I was back to the central part of the image and chose FILTERS>SHARPEN>Unsharp Mask.   I stopped there, but could have made any other adjustments I wanted.  This process has the advantage of not being restricted to v. 1.9.2 and the Divide Blend mode,  and would be a relatively quick fix for many images, although not a one-stop shopping trip.

 

[firstdefence]

On 4/4/2021 at 3:17 PM, smadell said:

The windows are so close to being blown out that I fear you will never get a result you’re happy with. If ever there was a case for bracketed photos, this might be it. Read about “real estate photogtaphy,” HDR, and (even better) Exposure Fusion techniques.

There is also weird stuff going on with the strip lights making it very difficult to get a reasonable recovery. I thought haze removal would help here but unless you mask the ceiling lights it just exaggerates the ceiling light streak effect. As Smadell says bracketing would have helped a lot here.

[smadell]

After having said that you'll never get a result you'd be happy with, I guess I couldn't resist the urge to try. I still think that bracketing would be a far better solution, but (lacking a time machine) that's not an option. I created a mask of the windows and the lights, applied it to a group, and added adjustments to Brightness and Contrast and then HSL. Here's a composite of my effort:

[jmwellborn]

Here's another effort.  I was trying to avoid the pixellation in @smadell's image.  I tried various and sundry things with spectacularly howling lack of success, so the history is going to look like something out of a "how not to. . . manual" but I have included it in the attached file all the same.   Since @Vale22 wanted to brighten the colors and contrast, I also used "Dave's 6-Layer High Pass Sharpening.afmacro" (you can find this in Resources: Multi-layer high-pass sharpening (with macro) to give the image some instant sharpening.  

The attached file was done in v. 1.8.4 so it can be imported into v. 1.9.2.

Using_6-layer_high_pass_sharpening.afphoto

   

[Vale22]

wow, guys, thank you so much for this support. I will start the editing in a few days, taking into consideration your advices. @jmwellborn I really appreciate you taking the time for this. I will also try masking and exposure adjustments as @Old Bruce suggested, hopefully I will get an acceptable quality for these images.

I will post the results here, after I find the right solution from your suggestions.