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Removing water spots on lens
I read a few posts from people with this same problem. I recently watched a tutorial on boris filters. They made facial blemishes vanish and removed a bird flying across the sky. New to FC so please don’t fault my lack of knowledge or curiosity but is it possible to use that same filter (or anything else within FC) to make one or two water spots go away? They are only visible in a few shots that we really want to include.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
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16 Replies
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You can duplicate the video track, offset it by as few pixels as possible, then use a soft-edged mask to cover the blemished area with nearly-right pixels.
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Grr…do not think the boris effect will work at all. Effect called wire remover in Keys Matte. Applied it and played with it with no success. What should I try now?
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Hi Heather,
Yes you have to use the same technique that is basically to mask the area with part of the very image.
In the end the result will depend very much of what you want to mask, the size, the and the movement inside the picture, the camera movement..
A bird crossing a blue sky in front of a static camera will be very easy to mask. A drop of water of a certain size with some camera movement or movement in the background will be very difficult.
rafael -
Sounds like a great idea…so again, as if you were speaking to an elementary student. Duplicate I understand. Offset? Soft edge mask under Mattes? So am I just changing the duplicate and laying it on top of the original so that the water spot is blurred or covered?
So sorry to need further instructions here
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Digital HEaven has a plug in that may help, depending on how big the drops are. it would sure help us to know, if you could post a still frame from the video with the spots visible.
I’ll try to set up a similar effect and post you a step-by-step. Meanwhile, duplicate the video track and get it set up in synch with track one. Double-click to highlight that second video layer. Then go to your top menu bar and find Effects>Video Effects>Masks>4-point masking tool.
We’ll try to talk you down to the runway.
And don’t call me Shirley…
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Ok…here he is. There is the very obvious water spot on the left in front of his arm and a smaller one around his hand/fruit on right.
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OK, I’m going to walk you thru a very simplified procedure here, I’m sure someone else would give you a better tutorial. Anyway, this is something you can also practice doing in photoshop, we’re doing a similar thing here, just with multiple frames. Copy and paste an identical video track above on track 2 and highlight it/select it. See the window on the far left, get yours set up the same way.
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Step two, I use the opacity slider to make the top layer 50 percent transparent so when I move the layer around in the next step, I can see where I’m going to steal a patch of better pixels to lay on top of that splotch on his arm, like a bandaid.
Where it says “center” click the little crosshair too, a red crosshair appears on the video, use your mouse to drag it over a little bit. A short a distance as possible, we need the pixels to come from as near a neighborhood as possible.
I have also bumped up the scale just a little bit.
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Next you see me using the crop tools to mask off most of the top layer, then I’ll restore the transparency to 100 percent opaque, and we have our fleshy band-aid in rough form.
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In this step I refined the left, right, top and bottom crops, added some feathering on the edges of the crop, then I applied the 3-way color corrector to that top track and adjusted the middle brightness slider and got a whole lot closer to matching. I also threw on some gaussian blur filter. This is not finished, but I think now that you see some basic steps you could do it better than I can.
I was going to show you the 4-point masking tool, but maybe that should wait until you’ve played with this simple offset cropping of a second layer. The theory behind this fix is, the drops are a fixed point on the lens so if you offset a duplicate layer of video at the beginning, it stays in synch with your video, just offset by a few pixels to the side, and you’re cutting a little window for that patch to cover over or show thru (you can do the thing using either layer, just reverse the patch to a hole or vice-versa).
I hope that is a little bit of help, I was really pressed for time and couldn’t do a better job just now. But hopefully it gave you a starting point to explore solutions on your own.
As far as photoshop skills, if you are good at photoshop, what you can do is mark and in and out on the bad section, export it as a frame movie, i.e. still photo sequence (use tif or tga), bring that stack of stills into photoshop, and use the healing or clone brush tools to paint out each frame. Re-save the frames and re-import them back to the timeline, poor man’s rotoscoping.
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