Removing/minimising unwanted lens flare

Video_flaneur wrote on 6/10/2017, 7:40 PM

I have time lapse footage of fog rolling over and gradually revealing a heritage building. During one section the sun falls directly on the camera lens and creates an unwanted flare.

I have tried using a cookie cutter to punch a hole through to an unaffected image, but that way the rolling fog does not look realistic. I have pondered adding some additional manufactured lens flares to make it look arty, but my preference would be just to reduce or remove the existing flare. Does anyone have any suggestions for doing those using Vegas or Vegas add-ons?

Comments

xberk wrote on 6/10/2017, 8:43 PM

Seems to me a mask filled with the right stuff will do it .. but likely you'll need motion tracking to achieve it .. You could do it in Vegas with lots key frames (depending on how much the flare moves) .. or something like Resolve that has motion tracking .. Also as the lighting changes, so must the mask .. a bit tricky but I'd say doable.

Video_flaneur wrote on 6/10/2017, 10:48 PM

Seems to me a mask filled with the right stuff will do it .. but likely you'll need motion tracking to achieve it ..

The camera is fixed on a tripod so I don't think I would need tracking motion. Since the flare is a sort of pink against a fairly monochrome grey-green I was looking for a way to tone down the pinks.

NickHope wrote on 6/11/2017, 12:02 AM

You can tone down the pinks somewhat with the Color Corrector (Secondary), or even 2 of them in series:

I much prefer working with it in the Custom mode.

First pick "Select effect range" and sample a part that includes the most saturated area of pink. There is a long-standing bug whereby the rectangular marquee does not display as you select the area.

I then dragged the 2 "High" sliders to the far right, to unlimit the maximum luminance and saturation. Then click on "Show mask" and tweak the other parameters such as "Smooth" until you get a nice mask. Do not move the "limit hue - Center".

Once you have the mask, a quick improvement is to reduce the Saturation slider a lot, and then the Gain slider a bit until the luminance matches.

You might find you can uncheck "Limit luminance" completely and just control the mask with the hue and saturation.

The fact that it leaves that slightly stripey effect indicates you might get more success with 2 instances in series. Tackle the worst pink parts with the first instance and then the overall pinkish area with the second, or possibly vice versa.

Video_flaneur wrote on 6/11/2017, 12:23 AM

Thank you xberk & Nick. I've had a quick play with the secondary colour correction and it looks like that will do the trick. There is still some muted flare left but that effect is fine and does not dominate in the way the original did.