Cleaning the bugs from a windscreen after the shoot

I recently had a gorgeous and historic Aston Martin DB3 S to shoot at Goodwood for a magazine feature and, tight on time, and with rain threatening, had to shoot the statics quickly straight after the track test.

Aston Martin DB3S-3
Aston Martin DB3S-3

This isn’t ideal as the car can collect a myriad of bugs on the windscreen and I only noticed when I got back home and was back in front of my Mac editing the images. Glass or lightweight perspex in this case is always tricky to retouch as the light is often graduated from light to darker across the panel and great care must be taken with the clone tool or healing brush to avoid making a mess of it.

Aston Martin DB3S-1
Aston Martin DB3S-1

A quick solution is to start out with the clone tool set to a low opacity of 60-80% and copy over each bug mark from a point immediately adjacent to it on a high magnification and then go over it again at 15-25% with larger brush from the cloning tool palette to smooth any marks…

Aston Martin DB3S-2w
Aston Martin DB3S-2w

One thing you learn the more shoots you do is what to worry about on the day and what you can leave until later.With the benefit of hindsight there are many things you might have done differently at the time but the important point is to recognise priorities so you can get on with the main part of your day…photographing the car. This is useful to remember both on location and in the studio where it’s easy to spend valuable minutes fretting over a small highlight that could be removed in seconds during post production.