How to clear this sky?

[Daniel Roy]

Team, 

If you look at this picture, how would you get across removing the kind of 'red aurora borealis' which appeared in the screen after modifying the colour balance/exposure/vibrance of the picture?

In other words how would you get across unifying the sky look and feel while keeping the windows reflection elements, and of course not reverting back the changes on colours themselves?

Best 
Dan

[Conrad_C]

There are many potential approaches to this. One is to simply select the parts of the sky with the red reflection and use Generative Fill to remove the red area and fill it in with what the rest of the sky looks like. That’s what I tried in the picture below, and although it isn’t perfect, it only took a few seconds so it won’t take much time to clean up the rest.

Another, more manual and traditional way is to add a layer mask with an adjustment layer that desaturates, and paint the desaturation into the “aurora” area to remove the red. But that might still leave a contrast difference, so a little more manual retouching (healing, replacing, patching) might be needed. This method might be preferable if you aren’t allowed to use generative AI for the final result.

[mglush]

Do you really just want to get rid of the red in the sky? 

You can use a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and in the dropdown menu, change it from Master to Red, and then drad the Saturation slider down until you are satisfied. Then you can use the layer mask to fine tine exactly where you want to eliminate the reds.

Let us know if that does what you want?

Michelle

[Daniel Roy]

Thank you Michelle. I believe this is the right approach. I had a first pass at it. It sounds much promising and generates variations and effects I am most interested in. 

Conrad, thank you very much too for your suggestions. I will give it a try too. Although the picture is 20,000 pixels plus wide and way out of dimensions for geneative fill. A piecemeal approach could work. And I believe this isnt the first time you provide help on my questions. Thank you.

Have both a great rest of the week.

Best,
Dan

[mglush]

Thanks Dan! I am glad to hear that the process works!

Michelle

[Daniel Roy]

@mglush Michelle and team I am back with this one. While indeed playing with hue on a layer mask did solve most of the issue, there must have been some splashes on the windows which I cant figure out how to remove (incidentally I tried remove tool). 

The picture will be about 2m by 2m so this will clearly be noticeable...

Any idea crowd pls? splashes traces

[mglush]

Hi!

Here are a couple of options for you! 

1. Use a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer but with nothing hidden by the mask. This will get rid of the majority of the red. Then you want to use a Levels Adjustment Layer (See Step 2).

Step 2: Using a Levels adjustment layer and changing each individual channel will give you control over the color in the image. By setting the Black Point (Left slider to the edge of the histogram, it neutralizes the color in the image. By doing it to each individual channel allows you to adjust each color channel to get the effect you want. After adjusting the Black slider, you can then adjust the white slider to fine tune the color look you want. If you want it a little cooler, then drag the white slider in the Red channel over to the left. If you want the image with no color cast, I h ave had really good success by aligning each of the sliders to each end of the histogram. And then I play with color from there to add a color cast if I want to.

I hope that gives you something to help? Let me know if you have any questions!

Michelle