Glare in photos is caused by light bouncing off a reflective surface at an angle, and into your camera. It is difficult to account for and tough to avoid, which is why it is one of the more common flaws that plagues many photos.
The good news is that you can get rid of glare by editing it out, and there are several tools that you could use. However the two options that you should try are PhotoWorks on a PC and iPhoto on a mobile phone.
Remove Glare in PhotoWorks
Not only will PhotoWorks make it easy to remove glare by editing your photo on a PC — but it will give you several different ways that you can go about it:
- Adjust the highlights
The easiest way to remove glare in your photo is to adjust the Highlights level in PhotoWorks. It can be found under the Enhancement section of the editor, alongside the other color parameters.
Essentially the ‘highlights’ are the brightest areas of the photos — which in this case is the glare. By adjusting the slider to the left you will be able to darken the glare, and make it less invasive.
That being said this option may affect other bright areas of your photos too. As such it is best to only use it when the area of the glare is by far the brightest spot in the photo — and there are few others.
- Apply the Portrait Magic feature
The Portrait Magic feature in PhotoWorks is designed specifically to enhance portraits, and is located in the Retouch section. It contains several presets, and you should select the Remove Face Shine option to get rid of facial glare.
If you want you could then switch over to the Custom Settings tab and adjust the Glare slider in the Skin section to refine it further. In some cases adjusting the Smoothing slider can help to mitigate the ‘greasy effect that glare can often produce on skin.
- Use the Adjustment Brush and Clone Stamp tools
The best results can be obtained by retouching your photos by hand — and that will require the Adjustment Brush and Clone Stamp tools.
Both these tools are located in the Retouch tab, and can play different roles in getting rid of glare. The Adjustment Brush can be used to select the glare and adjust its color settings to make it less striking. In contrast the Clone Stamp will let you clone a different part of your photo over the glare to hide it completely.
Together both of these tools will let you remove practically any type of glare from any photo. However as you can probably imagine it will take time to retouch photos manually in this fashion, and will require some experience to get it right.
Seeing as you know how to remove glare from a photo now — why not give it a try using one of your photos. All you need to do is fire up PhotoWorks, load the photo, and try out one (or more) of the methods described above.
While you’re at it you should explore some of the other features in the editor and see how they work too. If you familiarize yourself with the full scope of PhotoWorks’ features you’ll be able to produce truly spectacular photos by fixing any issues that crop up and creating stunning visual effects.
Eliminate Glare in iPhoto
If you happen to be using an iPhone, you can eliminate glare quite effectively with the iPhoto app itself.
Essentially iPhoto contains a Retouch tool that is designed to help automatically detect and remove glare. It is quite good at what it does, and should be able to remove glare from certain areas of your photos without affecting any of the rest of it.
To get started all you need to do is open up your photo in iPhoto by selecting it from your Library or opening it from the File tab. Next you will have to press the Edit icon and select the Retouch tool under the Quick Fixes section.
Once you’ve selected the Retouch tool just adjust its size and move it to the area that has glare. When you do the glare will be eliminated — and you can proceed to save your photo.
Comparatively you’ll have a lot less control if you choose to eliminate glare using iPhoto, but it will get the job done in most cases. Because the Retouch tool will only manipulate the area that it is applied on, the rest of your photo should remain as-is.
Conclusion
Overall it is up to you whether you want to edit your photos on your PC to remove glare using PhotoWorks, or directly on your mobile phone with iPhoto. The former will definitely provide you with much more control over how your photos turn out however, and will give you the opportunity to enhance and improve them in far more ways.
It may help to give both options a try — to see which one seems to be the best fit for you.