This GIMP tutorial shows you how to remove glare on glasses, and you’re familiar with GIMP, this should be a pretty easy.
If you’re a GIMP beginner, you might want to get to know GIMP a little before you jump into this tutorial.
I explain all of the steps as I go in this GIMP video tutorial, but if you just started using GIMP there might be a lot of new information to absorb. If you want to learn GIMP fast, get my GIMP book- Before and After available here. It’s incredibly affordable, and comes with tons of extras like GIMP tutorial videos and high quality images to practice techniques with.
For more GIMP tutorials, check out the Public Library page here at How-to-GIMP.com. For free GIMP video tutorials, check out the Free Videos page.
Here’s the full GIMP video tutorial, and the written tutorial. Have fun!
The video shows you how to use GIMP to achieve a few different effects. You’ll probably need more than one technique to fully correct the glare on your glasses. The techniques you choose, and your end results, will depend on the picture you start with. A photo with the person facing the camera (not at an angle) might be easier to fix than one where the person is facing slightly away from the camera. Small amounts of glare will be easier to correct than glasses that are completely blown out by glare.
GIMP Tutorial – How to Remove Glare on Glasses
- Do all basic correction before you start. Correct colors, and adjust brightness and contrast as necessary. You can tweak this more later, but it’s easier to start with a photo that’s already corrected.
- Take a look at the glasses. Does one lens have more or less glare than the other? Because eyes (and glasses) are fairly symmetrical, we can copy the lens with less glare, and flip it to make a mirror image of that lens. Then all you have to do is paste it over the lens that has more glare.
- To copy the lens, use the Lasso Tool from the toolbox to draw a line around the lens that has less glare. When you get back around to the starting point, the line will turn into ‘marching ants’, or a moving dotted line. That lets you know the line is now a selection.
- Now, go to Edit > Copy in the main menu to copy the lens you just selected.
- You don’t want to paste this lens directly on the picture, so create a new layer for it. Pasting on it’s own layer will let me alter the lens later, without effecting the picture underneath.
- To make the new layer, go to the Layers Dialogue, and right click on the background layer’s thumbnail. Choose Add New Layer from the menu that pops up. A new window will pop up asking you what kind of layer you want to create. Choose Transparency, and click OK.
- Now, click on this new layer so it’s highlighted in blue in the Layers Dialogue. Any editing you do will only effect the highlighted layer, so it’s important to make sure this new blank layer is highlighted so when we paste the lens, it gets pasted onto the new layer, instead of the background picture.
- Now, go to Edit > Paste in the main menu, to paste the lens onto the new transparent layer. Then, click the Anchor button at the bottom of the Layers Dialogue to finish pasting the lens onto the transparent layer.
- To flip the lens, go to Layer > Transform > Flip Horizontally. The lens will flip into the correct orientation. Now, you need to move it, and maybe rotate it into place.
- To move it into position, grab the Move Tool form the Toolbox then click and drag the lens into position. It may be easier to see when you’ve gotten the lens into the right place if you reduce the opacity of the lens without he Opacity Slider in the LAyers Dialogue (it’s temporary) so you can see when the new lens lines up with the original lens underneath. When you’re happy, make the lens opaque again.
- You might need to rotate the lens a little to make it really match up perfectly. Use the Rotate tool from the Toolbox to rotate the lens a little, then click Rotate to apply the rotation. You can use the same opacity trick to make sure the kens is lined up correctly.
- At this point, I would add a layer mask and hide some of the hard edges of the lens to make it look more blended in. It’s pretty much like erasing, except you can undo what you’ve ‘erased’ very easily by painting white on the mask instead of black. If you don’t want to bother with a layer mask, you could use the eraser tool to tough up the edges too.
- Another option is to clone over any remaining reflection.
- Use the clone tool from the toolbox, set a source that is the same color and texture as the skin and eye that is hidden by reflection, then stamp over the reflection. You can re-set your source as you go to make everything match.
- The last option is to darken the reflection a bit, so it’s less distracting. You can either do this with the Dodge/Burn tool in the Toolbox or by using a combination of a new darkened image layer, and a layer mask that will hide everything except the darkened reflection. I describe the second method in the video.
When you’re all done tweaking, save your picture as a jpg by going to File > Export, naming your file, and ending it with .jpg. Click save, and when the next window pops up, save it at the highest quality (100%)
You’re all done!
If you liked this GIMP tutorial, there’s more where that came from!
Check out the Public Library page here at How-to-GIMP.com for more GIMP tutorials, and the Free Videos page for more GIMP video tutorials.
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