Herring Gull processing help.

[Iain Barker]

I took this image of a Herring Gull with the strong side lighting A couple of weeks ago.

I have done some precessing such as cloning out a gull on the water right next to the birds beak. I am not sure of the best way to deal with the yellow flare circle top left.
I now I could crop that part of the image but is there a way to at least make it less noticeable?

Also what was the most likely cause? Would it be dust on the lens?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Nikon D7000 18-70mm f3.5-5.6 @ 60mm 1/125sec f9.0 ISO 100.

[Diane Miller]

Great job on the cloning -- I never would have known. I'd get rid of the bright rectangle in the UR.

The flare is caused by light directly striking the front element of the lens and bouncing around between the very reflective sensor and lens elements. It's also made much worse by any filter you have on the lens. Prevented by removing any filters and shading the front element. If you could select that area well enough you could do color and contrast correction.

There is a blue cast in the shaded areas of the image, easily corrected. Maybe there is more detail to be found in the highlights as well -- what was your processing?

[Iain Barker]

Thanks Diane
Before doing the cloning I did my adjustments in lightroom. I set the white balance to daylight, didn't really change the exposure sliders other than a bit of recovery has the highlights were just on the edge of beening blown. I then did slight adjustments to clarity, saturation and vibrancy. Is this where the cast came from as I recall the blue becoming more prominent when changing saturation. Do I just alter the blue saturation to fix the cast?

I then did the cloning and sharpening before export.

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[Steve Kaluski]

Iain, leave the WB to auto, no cast as you can see. If you want, you can then use the WB picker to find as close a mid grey as your starting point so you have a 50/50/50 (as near as dam it) within the RGB channels, then you can 'customise' how you wish the image to look like overall. Didn't you see the colour change when you changed the WB setting?

Steve

[Iain Barker]

Hi Steve

If I know that a group of photos were all taken at the same time I sometimes update the white balance for them all at the same time. Maybe now in hindsight this is something I shouldn't do. I can't remember if I then tried adjusting it for this picture.
I will be revisiting the processing to try and remove the flare so will check over all processing again at the same time.

[Diane Miller]

If the camera is on auto WB, the result can vary depending on the composition -- the camera can only guess. And the WB presets in LR / ACR are generally awful with my Canon bodies. As Shot or Auto are often the best starting point, then tweak the Temp and Tint sliders a needed, and use the gray eyedropper if there is an area that should be gray in the image. Then tweak Saturation or Vibrance and go back and tweak the Temp and Tint -- then go to HSL and work on channels. It's not common to need to do all that, but it's the way to get the best results.

Then you can sync those settings to other shots, but the camera's auto WB was probably a little different for all of them. A custom WB is good (but needs to be redone as light changes), or use one of the camera presets and at least all the shots will have more consistency.

Just look for color casts as you develop an image -- it takes some practice to learn to see them.

[keith mitchell]

Ian looks like you got some sound advice don't think that I can add anything, sorry.

Keith.