# How to remove smoke from fireworks?



## andrewochs615 (Jul 10, 2013)

I recently took some fireworks shots over 4th of July, and I was wondering if there was an easy way to remove the smoke from leftover from the busts.  I have lightroom 4 so I don't think I can do any masking. Here are examples of what I a talking about. 





Any help would be great thanks.


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## KmH (Jul 10, 2013)

The smoke is on a background that is a gradient, darker at the top of the frame than at the city skyline.

While the smoke can be cloned away, it would have to be done in stages and with care.

While improved, Lightroom 4's clone tool is still pretty crude compared to the Clone and Healing tools in Photoshop. Lightroom's inability to edit pixels can also be a drawback.
This is the type of editing situation that necessitates having a pixel editor like Photoshop Elements, GIMP, Photoscape, CS 6, or CC to compliment Lightroom's limitations.


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## andrewochs615 (Jul 10, 2013)

KmH said:


> The smoke is on a background that is a gradient, darker at the top of the frame than at the city skyline.
> 
> While the smoke can be cloned away, it would have to be done in stages and with care.
> 
> ...



Ok thanks, maybe I will look into Gimp


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## Buckster (Jul 10, 2013)

andrewochs615 said:


> I recently took some fireworks shots over 4th of July, and I was wondering if there was an easy way to remove the smoke from leftover from the busts.  I have lightroom 4 so I don't think I can do any masking. Here are examples of what I a talking about.
> 
> View attachment 49682
> 
> ...


I can't think of a way to pull it off in LR, at least not by itself.  There are masking programs with LR plugins that might be up to the task, but you'd still probably need some pixel-level editing to complete the task.

Using Photoshop CS6 and Topaz Remask 3 to make the mask, I was able to take it this far in about 15 minutes of work:






So, it's not impossible if you've got a good way to mask and edit pixels.  I would say that I've got a lot of practice at masking and PS manipulation, so it might not be as quick or easy for someone with less experience at this sort of thing.  In the end, it'll depend on how much it means to you to remove that stuff, unless the value of learning it for possible future use holds any interest or value for you, in which case I'd say go for it to gain the skills.

By the way, the images you posted have pretty significant posterization, which makes it much more difficult to work with them on a task like this.  If you decide to pursue it, be sure you're using images that haven't been seriously compromised by file size reduction.

Best of luck with it!


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## andrewochs615 (Jul 11, 2013)

Well I tried to clean up the smoke a little with the clone tool in Lightroom, which worked ok. I tried to create a mask in GIMP but because of the gradient of the sky from the city lights I couldn't really get anything good. Here are my results with lightroom clone. This was my first real time shooting fireworks so still got a lot to learn. Maybe next time I will try the back hat trick I have read a lot about,  PS thank you guys for your input.


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