I did a shoot the other night and it was a run and gun headshot shoot and i fiddled with the lighting a bit to try and get rid of the glare on one of the subjects but i couldnt afford to spend anymore time getting rid of it... i guess it was a little warmer in there to her than the rest of the people but is there something you guys do to get rid of glares from people? i basically need a "matte" tool in photoshop haha
Hard to say without seeing the image but I usually use the clone tool at a very low opacity to go over the glare with some nearby skin. Don't have to cover it, just knock it back a bit.
Would a polarizing filter help you to avoid the problem in the first place ?
In general, I think that glare is hard to remove without some sort of cloning but I'm no Ps expert. Better by far to prevent the problem, which applies to water and landscape scenes as much as it does to portraits with studio lighting. The main reason is that the glare is pretty much white and masks the underlying colour even if you are able to extract some texture.
I'm not sure if a CP would have helped or not. I've never ran into this issue before as i RARELY shoot people... sorry about no image. I'll post it up when i get home.
On lens Polarizing filters work to remove glare on flat surfaces like water but on a curved face the light hits and reflects from various angles and then are not as effective. For applications such as copying textured oil paints without glare a technique called cross-polarization is used. It consists of polarizing gels over the lights and a polarizing filter over the lens.
In portraits its a function of skin texture and when there a glare its usually due to make-up or lotion the person has used. When I encounter specular highlights in speed light portraits I take with my small 8" diameter DIY modifiers I use the CS5 clone tool in darken mode. Here's an example: http://super.nova.org/TP/DS03E.jpg
Set to darken mode the clone tool will only blend in a darker sampled area to the point it matches the area surrounding the specular highlight I'm trying to tone down. Then after doing the cloning I ran my usual skin retouching action which uses a combination of surface blur and high pass sharpening layers.
