Exercise - Correction

For this exercise I needed to look through my image collection and find one with dust shadows and another with polygon flare. The polygon flare image was taken in Lincoln and the dust shadow taken from the key resources section of the student website as I couldn't find one.  This is the before and after correction:

Dust shadow before:

 

I scrolled through the image at 100% magnification and first thought that the bubbles in the glass must have been the dust shadows as I couldn't see anything on the white areas of the image. I searched on the internet for some other examples of dust shadows to help with identification. I settled on the black area in the bottom right corner, and took this to be my shadow to remove. Actually it wouldn't really matter to me if this was removed or not as it could easily appear as part of the image.

Using Lightroom's spot removal, I easily removed the area of black which was replaced with the pink of the surrounding area. Interestingly in my book 'Photoshop Lightroom 3' by Martin Evening, it states 'When you work with the spot removal, red eye correction, adjustment brush, or graduated filter tools, these actions are recorded as sets of instructions, and the pixel image date in the original master file remains untouched. It is only when you choose to export a file that the retouching work is physically applied to the exported image'

 

Dust shadow after, where the black area is corrected:

 



The polygon flare image was taken in the direction of the sun and thus creating the flare on the image:

This was a little more tricky as the clone tool I used takes away the flare but also takes away detail. The two larges flares were removed but I decided to leave the one on the blue sky area as the clone tool kept putting a black line through the area as it was cloning from the area to the left of the flare, where the 'pole' can be seen, I am sure this could be avoided when I know more about using this method.

After correction:

In this case the flare was right through the centre of the image and either needed to be removed (although on close inspection the correction could be identified), but I feel that the polygon flare can add to an image depending on what effect is desired and what the object in the image is.