19 - Chasing Ghosts of Light - Remove Lens Flares in Lightroom Classic – A 30-Second Fix

How to remove stubborn lens flares in Lightroom Classic without killing the soul of your image. (8min read)

We’d just left Wetzlar behind on our road trip. It was the starting line. Leica city. The kind of place where every corner smells of glass and precision. (a full Roadtrip Substack about to follow)
Matt (MrLeica.com), Thomas, and I are three men too deep into photography to call it a hobby anymore.

They had planned a shoot with Kim. Late afternoon. A white Opel Commodore. Not a car. A time capsule. Chrome and sunburned vinyl. She was already there when we pulled in. Waiting with a kind of calm confidence.
Kim sat on the driver's seat. Then in the trunk. The body of the car flashed like a blade under the sun.

I shot wide open with the old 50mm f/1.4 Carl Zeiss Biotar. A piece of glass born for 16mm film. I’d rebuilt and calibrated it for my Leica M9. Still coated with the old Zeiss T. I used no lens hood. Just a variable ND filter. That meant flares.

I wanted flares. The filmic look. Vintage. Romantic, but with dirt under the fingernails. Shooting into the sun is a gamble, and I took it willingly.
But I didn’t check the screen.

Later that night, scrolling through the shots in a dim appartment room, I saw the damage. Some photos weren’t ruined — they were obliterated. Lens flares the size of moons. One right across her face.
Not the good kind. Not the ones that flirt. These ones shouted.

And yet... the mood, the body language, the frame — it was all too good to throw away.

I sat down at the laptop. Matt across from me. Thomas made tea and called it a night. The light in the room was the color of tungsten and regret.
The tea got cold. I didn’t care.

That night, I found a way back.

Before and After - Lens flare removed in 30 seconds