Need some photoshop help on this one...

Need some photoshop help on this one... I had to shoot this shot through a dirty glass window and what I got was some discoloration/banding in the upper right corner. Anyone have a few tips on how to get rid of this? Cloning won't do as the color darkens as it gets closer to the corner.

I don't see anything that bothers me in the upper right corner. What seems more "interesting" is the appearance of the water about half-way up & an inch to the right of the left edge.

You can try either the dodge brush or burn brush on a duplicate layer, either burn the lighter spots or dodge the darker spots, then fiddle with the layer opacity to see if you can make them match. In the least you would be able to diminish the way it looks, maybe to the point where it's not easily seen. And I agree with PhotosGuy, the river looks a little weird...could just be shadows, might not be visible if it's not pointed out, but since he mentioned it, it does look weird.

Try this:

1. Add a blank layer and put it in "darker color" mode.
2. Get a soft round brush at low opacity (15% to 20%)
3. Sample a dark area to set the brush color (alt-click)
4. Paint over the light area, multiple strokes at low opacity is the key.

That's a fairly forgiving process because if your brush strokes stray into the original dark area or an even darker area no change is made (not painting a darker color). You can switch to the eraser brush (also at low opacity) to un-do any brush strokes. Takes a little trial-and-error plus patience, but works well to smooth out uneven tones in things like skies and water.

On this image I'd recommend doing it in two steps. One for the sky and one for the water, so you can easily mask out the horizon line and the buildings. Actually, I'd probably use several blank painting layers, one for each target area, or even separate layers to "build up" the density in one area.

Thanks for the tips guys. Red, your brush strokes on a different layer are working great. About the water in the river, I don't know what to say. It's actually how the water looked/looks at that time of hour. There was a boat or two, it was windy and there are two currents from the river splitting which causes the flowing look to the water.

I would mask the sky and water from your edits so that the blurred streaks do not get amplified from the heavy application of local contrast (clarity or a local tone mapper or whatever else you used).

You could also apply a gentle surface blur to those areas and blend that into the composite.

kirk

I've been in Chicago enough to know that the water often looks just like that! You may want to blur the edges of those lightness transitions to get it a little more pleasing, but personally I find nothing wrong with it.

Great shot, too.