For professional photographers seeking the perfect image, there is nothing more crushing than coming back from a successful photo shoot, opening your new photos, and finding that many of them reflect a moiré pattern on an object, most often on clothing. When the subject of your image has clothing with a very fine pattern, that pattern can interact with the pattern of the pixel layout of your camera sensor and result in both false color and false luminosity patterns on the image. In other words, moiré is a visual effect that happens when two similar patterns overlap, creating wavy and unwanted stripes of color on part or all of a photo that wasn’t seen with the naked eye. When you have a high-resolution sensor and no low-pass filter built in (much like the Leica SL2-S camera I often use), it tends to make moiré even more prevalent.
Below is an example from a recent photo session of mine. As the image shows, there are both color variations and pattern variations. Both have to be removed.
If you are fortunate, you can open the file in Photoshop, open Camera Raw, create a new mask by selecting an adjustment brush, brush over the area with moiré, and then scroll down to the bottom and move the moiré reduction slider as necessary. Sometimes this works, but in this case it did not work for me. You may also get lucky using blur or frequency separation.
If other methods do not work and the moiré you are confronted with is more complicated, I have good news. After months of searching I came across a video by John Wheeler with JKW Consulting, Inc. entitled “A New Way to Remove Moiré,” and it is magic. He takes you through the process of creating a layer to address the color issue and another layer to address the pattern issue. Once both are resolved, the moiré is gone!
In celebration of finding this great video, I created a Photoshop action that will set up the different layers for you. I am offering it for free, with no technical support, and I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me. Here is the link to the action: Moiré Removal Action. Once installed, just follow the instructions in the video. I found that at the end of the process – before making hue/saturation adjustements – I selected the object with moiré, copied just that item in its own layer above the background layer (Cmd J on a Mac) and then linked it to the hue/saturation adjustment layer. The I made the adjustments to remove the pattern.
To install an action to Adobe Photoshop:
– Open Photoshop and select Window then Actions
– Click the four horizontal lines in the top right corner of the Actions panel
– Select Load Actions from the drop-down menu
– Locate the action file with the extension .atn and click Open
– The action will appear as a folder in the Actions panel
I hope. you enjoy this important Photoshop tip for removing moiré.
