Affinity Photo Effective Way to Remove Lights behind Tree Branches?

[J. Web]

Hello, I'm working on removing street lights and their associated reflections from an image of a lake that I took and I've been able to use the inpainting brush to pretty effectively remove the bulk of the lights/reflections but the last one is proving to be very difficult. The lamp post itself is very easy but the reflection goes behind a set of branches and my attempts to remove it have only result in a great deal of frustration.

The two tools I've been working with the most were the inpaint brush and blemish removal but they end up mixing the branches around and making the image simply look worse than it did before. I've even tried shrinking the brush down and trying to work around the branches but with no luck. I'm still a novice when it comes to Affinity Photo and I'm not very familiar with the tool set and what I can do with it but I'd really like to get rid of this light and any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'd attach the project itself but it's quite large and my internet connection's upload speed is very slow.

 

Thanks!

[NathanC]

Hi @J. Web,

It would definitely help if you could provide a copy of your original image so we can look into what can be done based off of the full resolution image, if the .afphoto file is quite large to upload, could you export it out to JPEG/PNG which should have a smaller file size and then provide a copy of the exported file?

Many thanks!

[David in Яuislip]

Quick and dirty
Marquee around the reflection
HSL layer, select yellow then use colour picker
Pull down saturation and luminosity
Deal with the greyish tinge by
Sampling a relevant colour
Add a pixel layer, blend mode set to colour
Paint over the grey
Attack what looks like ripples on the lake with a blur brush

As noted by NathanC above, it would be preferable to provide a full res image even if it's just the same crop, I'd recommend a tiff though so that the forum software doesn't mangle it

[firstdefence]

I would say go for a replacement angle, it's just too fiddly to get any semblance of a quality finish.

So in the image below I have replaced the river first and overlaid branches changing the layers blend mode to Multiply because of the lighter background behind the branches, you could also use a tree brush. The river is the thames and skewed slightly to simulate the correct flow direction for the flow of the original river. 

light cast onto river removal.afphoto

 

These were the images I used.

https://pixabay.com/images/id-6194461/

https://pixabay.com/images/id-1866766/ (Had to darken this one a bit)

[J. Web]

8 hours ago, NathanC said:

Hi @J. Web,

It would definitely help if you could provide a copy of your original image so we can look into what can be done based off of the full resolution image, if the .afphoto file is quite large to upload, could you export it out to JPEG/PNG which should have a smaller file size and then provide a copy of the exported file?

Many thanks!

Thanks for the tip. I’m away from my computer right now but I have an older version of the file on hand which I’ve attached here. It has the other lights in it still but the light on the far left is the one giving me grief.

[J. Web]

7 hours ago, David in Яuislip said:

Quick and dirty
Marquee around the reflection
HSL layer, select yellow then use colour picker
Pull down saturation and luminosity
Deal with the greyish tinge by
Sampling a relevant colour
Add a pixel layer, blend mode set to colour
Paint over the grey
Attack what looks like ripples on the lake with a blur brush

As noted by NathanC above, it would be preferable to provide a full res image even if it's just the same crop, I'd recommend a tiff though so that the forum software doesn't mangle it

This looks really promising and I’m going to try both this one and @firstdefence’s solution when I get home. I attached a full size (albeit older) .png file in a follow up comment. Are there any changes/optimizations that you might be able to recommend with it or should I stick this fix and tinker with the coloring some more?

Thanks!

[J. Web]

Hello @firstdefence,

This seems like it could work pretty well. I’ll give it a shot once I get home and see how it works out.

Thanks!

[Old Bruce]

12 hours ago, J. Web said:

I'm working on removing street lights and their associated reflections from an image of a lake that I took and I've been able to use the inpainting brush to pretty effectively remove the bulk of the lights/reflections but the last one is proving to be very difficult.

Looking at the image I would be tempted to use the Clone Brush Tool instead of the Inpainting Brush Tool.

here is what I got with the Clone Brush Tool.

Before

After

 

[J. Web]

@Old Bruce & @David in Яuislip, I was able to combine your two solutions into something that I'm pretty happy with. I'll attach the final(ish) image below. You can tell that something is a tad off about the area where the reflection was if you look really closely but it's not the kind of thing that I think most people would ever notice. The image isn't totally final since there's a few touch ups that still need to be done but I think it looks a lot better than it did before.

Thanks for the help!