Deke’s Techniques 319: Reducing Glare in a Photograph

In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke goes back to the scene of his presidential electoral victory from last week, the classic Parker Bros game of power politics Landslide, to remove glare from some of the game spaces. Each space requires a slightly different approach to removing glare, each of which can help you learn to remove your own glaring challenges. When all the votes are counted, here are the way before and much after shots:

Deke throws all kinds of strategies at this project this week:

First, there’s the quick and easy way, which involves burning away the glare using a spot of black "paint" to remove it. 

The second method is a labor-intensive, but highly effective, way that involves filling a more expertly selected area with an appropriate color (in this case, blue). To determine that color, you ironically click inside Utah…because Landslide was created in the 70s when blue and red didn’t have the meaning it does now. This high-tech approach involves that mysterious underlying layer command inside the Layer Style dialog box, which is enough reason to vote for Deke this week. 

Finally, for members of lynda.com, Deke’s got not one but two exclusive movies this week. The first involves restoring repeating details in a shot, and the second shows you how to use a camera phone-captured detail to fix an otherwise unavailable detail that you don’t have in your original image. (If you’re not a member of lynda.com, and you’d like a free week’s trial to check it out, you can sign up at lynda.com/deke.)

The open ballot is one of the best spots on the board (I think it’s the one where you force Deke to put one of his high-value states up for grabs, either stealing it from him or forcing him to spend votes to keep you from doing so.) But there’s only one, so you can’t steal the detail from another open ballot space.

Using a camera phone image to fix a DSLR shot? As wacky and deked out as this sounds, I think I could actually find myself in this situation. Hail to the Photoshop Chief for his creative leadership!

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