Any way to remove lens flare or dim it down a bit?

OriginV

Was bored last night so decided to go up to a car park with a good lot of street light about and have a go at taking pictures at night for the first time

One mistake I made was I did not bring a lens hood but I have learned from that...

Any ways in Photoshop CS5 or Lightroom 4 to remove or dim down some of the lens/light flare

Here is an example of one of the pictures :

Myksyk

Clone tool in PS would allow you select some of the dark areas beside the flare and brush it out.

Zillah

Lens hood won't do anything at all for light sources that are in front of the camera, all a hood does is stop light from sources off to the side of the camera having an impact. It might have helped with that small flare on the left side, but the real offenders are in the frame.

Number one thing is to make sure the front of the lens is super-clean. The slightest hint of moisture, a fingerprint or anything like that - even the smeared residue from a finger smudge after a hasty clean - will show up the lens flare like crazy. Try to keep the actual lights out of the frame too, you're going to get flare if you point directly at a light source. Do you have any filters on the lens? Get rid of those, especially something like a cheapo UV filter.

After that it is mostly down to optical quality of the lens, so get some fancier gear

You can clone/heal out some of the flare, but there's no general filter for it the way you could reduce, say, chromatic aberration. Flare is a shooting issue, not a post issue.

Gehad_JoyRider

yea next time you take the same picture look for the flare in the view finder and then flag it with your hand....