Sun glare on forehead

[davidj1]

Hello,

I have a photo with two subjects. Both of them have sun glare on a portion of their foreheads. I would like to remove that glare and blend those areas with the rest of the foreheads. However, I cannot figure out what tool(s) to use. I would appreciate your advice. Thanks!

Dave

[GarryP]

It would help us greatly if we could see the image; otherwise we’re just guessing.

[NotMyFault]

There are many options:

1. use hsl,, curves or similar adjustments combined with masks. Helps if areas are lighter, but not fully outblown
2. use patch tool to replace areas which are outblown (no more colors / texture)
3. use frequency separation. Allows to tackle colors (low frequency) independent from texture (high frequency). You can pain in colors using color sampling from intact areas. Use inpainting tool to polish transition areas.
4. Use inpainting for areas which are surrounded by „good“ areas. 

[NotMyFault]

 

[davidj1]

Of course, the image would help! Apologies for not including it originally.

[iconoclast]

That will not be easy, I think, because the forehead and parts of the hair of the man (and even on the face and neck of the woman and in the background) on the photo are so overexposed that there  is just a white area with no details and colour informations in it that could be restored by darkening this area. I'm afraid the only way to manage that is to retouch it by hand. That means by repainting that area.

[davidj1]

3 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

That will not be easy, I think, because the forehead and parts of the hair of the man (and even on the face and neck of the woman and in the background) on the photo are so overexposed that there  is just a white area with no details and colour informations in it that could be restored by darkening this area. I'm afraid the only way to manage that is to retouch it by hand. That means by repainting that area.

I was afraid of that. Someone else took the photo on an iPhone and sent it to me. Unfortunately I didn't think to reposition us to take the light source into consideration. Alas, I knew better but didn't care for that detail. Thanks for your thoughts!

[NotMyFault]

In cases like these, I use a somehow tedious workflow, which can deliver convincing results:

• Copy the source layer, and mirror. This acts as a source for cloning / patching from the „good“ side for e.g eyes and skin incl texture.
• for the women: use a rectangular patch below the sunburn area, and stretch it to cover the damaged area. Use a mask to define hard edges, and a vector mask with gradient to create a smooth transition.
• this only serves as color base for patch tool, which otherwise would blend to sunburn colors.
• for man, use similar process to recreate face colors (not hair).
• use patch tool, on separate pixel layer, using global source of mirrored copy, in source mode, to patch in texture from good side of face and eyes. Utilize rotation and scaling.
• for hair, use patch tool in source mode to repeatedly patch smaller areas.
• switch between patch / inpaint / clone if required

This process requires about an hour minimum, as you need to try multiple times. I love the patch tool for its huge power, but it is not easy to master.

[firstdefence]

You could download some skin textures and blend them in, making colour adjustments like in the edited image below.

This is just an example and can be done better with a bit more time and a better skin texture choice.

skin texture application.afphoto (approx 40Mb)

[firstdefence]

Forgot to add a link to some skin textures: https://www.freepik.com/photos/skin-texture

[RichardMH]

Quick and dirty approach is to create a new fill layer, use the picker to give it a skin colour from his forehead say, change the blend mode to darker colour, mask it out and brush it in. If you want to add texture sometimes the Patch tool with Texture only will do it once you have the colour.