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Posted on 12/11/2010 by maciek

Recently I¶ve been trying to find ways to manually remove shadows from images and tutorials
were surprisingly difficult to find. I got bits and pieces together and decided to write my own
little guide to not forget what I got. For all this I¶m going to use GIMP.

Image from Mamassian et al. 1998

First of all by shadow removal I mean getting rid of —

 
that occur when some strong
lighting is present ± I¶m disregarding  —
 
(see image for illustration what is
attached and what is a cast shadow). Cast shadows are important to the perception of the scene as
they contain information about the spatial layout of objects.

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When the shadows are due to a distant point light they are ³hard´ shadows, i.e. the penumbra is
negligible and there is a clear boundary between surfaces in shadow and out of shadow. A scene
like this is on the right ± simple surface with some texture and objects casting shadows on it. The
simplest way to get rid of the shadow is to simply make it brighter ± this will work provided you
can select the shadow (easy with hard edges) and you have enough information in there ± i.e. it¶s
not completely black.

To start with load the image into GIMP and select the Fuzzy Select Tool (or press Ñ). If you
click and drag on the area in shadow the selection will adapt dynamically. First make an initial
selection and then add missing parts to the selection by holding Shift and click-dragging and
remove unwanted parts by holding Ctrl and doing the same. After few clicks you should have
something light you see on the right (click on the image to magnify it if you can¶t see the
selection lines).

Now all we need to do is make the selected area brighter. One way of doing it is selecting
 


 
 and playing with the lines ± note that you can add multiple constraints on a
curve. For me something like that worked well, but play with the settings to get a feel. Also
make sure ³Preview´ box is checked so you can see the results in real time. Another way is to
play with Levels, Colour Balance, Brightness etc ± I just find Curves the easiest.

Now you still have a dark bound around your shadowed area right? That¶s because the selection
we used wasn¶t perfect, but not to worry ± all-powerful Healing Tool can help us out! Press  to
select the tool ± a circle appears as your brush. The clone tool takes a brush-shaped patch from
one bit of the image and copies it somewhere else. It¶s great for masking small imperfections in
more-or-less uniform areas. First Ctrl-click to select the source (somewhere close to the thing
you want to replace) and then click on the dark edge of the ex-shadow to replace it. You can
click-and-drag to copy from a larger area, but be careful that your source doesn¶t ³grab´ some
gradients you don¶t want.

Do this for the whole length of the edge always copying from nearby places to keep the colours
consistent. When you finish, you can admire your results ± you¶ve just removed a shadow! It
might not be perfect, but you get the idea ± if you tune the brightening parameters right you
should be able to get it exactly right.

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ÿ You can probably do everything with 

 tool, but I find it a little bit too fiddly.
It¶s great for finishing up though!

Unfortunately a lot of shadows in real photographs are not as hard as we could wish. For
example the image on the right cannot be really un-shadowed with a hard selection as above.
Fortunately GIMP has a neat feature called 
—
, which allows you to modify your
selection pretty easily, which means also make it soft edged. To start with select the shadow with
a  — . Try to keep it at one shadow level somewhere in the middle of the penumbra,
but you don¶t need to be extremely accurate.

Then click on the small square in the bottom-left corner of your GIMP window ± that¶s the

—
 button (alternatively press ). Most of the image turns red ± that is the area


 of your mask. What we need to do now is to feather the edges of the mask so whatever
effect we apply later on will will affect the edges a little bit, but not as much as inside. I chose to
use  



 
 but you can achieve the same effect with a soft eraser etc.
When you finish press Quick Mask button again to go back to selection view. Now you can
remove the shadow just like we did above ± Levels, Curves, Brightness ± whatever makes sense
to you. All the modifications will be applied fully in the middle, where the mask is strong and
only slightly on the edges. The secret is to make your mask mimic the shadow intensity as well
as possible. If afterwards you¶re not happy with the result, you can do the same again on other
areas or use the Burn/Dodge tool to darken/brighten some areas by hand.

There are probably different and better ways to do the same thing, but this one is reasonable
quick and easy. The final result can look much better than what I¶m showing here if you spend
enough time on it :)

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