Eliminating Shiny Hotspots In Your Images Using Lightroom

This video tip by photographer Anthony Morganti show you how to eliminate hotspots using Adobe Lightroom.

Hotspots are areas in an image (this episode deals with portraits) which are overexposed – this can happen in a sunny day but also sometimes when shooting using strong artificial light.

The way we are going to do this is to use the spot healing brush (in heal mode), have the feathering set high (say around %80) and paint the hotspot. Lightroom automatically picks an area to take the content from and adapt it to the area where the hotspot used to be. Now typically this doesn’t look very good – however – and here comes the most important part of the tip – you can very easily lower the opacity and make it blend in a much better way.

Some areas are going to pose a much bigger challenge and it won’t work in every case (especially if you don’t have a lot of similar places for sampling) however for a lot of cases this is going to be very very effective and even more importantly – very quick and simple.

You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section. You can more videos of Anthony Morganti here on Lensvid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.