I do love shooting into the sun. With old Nikon and Tokina lenses. Oops, flare and purple ghosts abound!
What module would be the most logical place to address these artifacts?
Ghosts! Nikon D7200 ISO220 f/22.0 AperturePriority 20.00mm 1/125sec
Are they really detrimental to your photos? Often, they contribute to the feel. In video production, they even add artificial lens flare to get the right mood.
The best tip I saw against lens flares once was putting the camera on a tripod, taking the shot, then blocking the sun with a finger in the frame taking a 2nd one. Afterwards the lens flares can be cloned out using the 2nd shot. Everything else will fail in one case or another.
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I’ld recomend a friendly and open one, most certainly you’d never catch one of us off gard; also and despite the bad rap most of us are unharming playfull aglomerations of ektoplasmic energie; {I like choco cookies}… and even if eventually you can get rid of that beautiful colourful ghost… there are so many of us everywhere, you might get unlucky and catch a nasty Jrofaksum {we call them that} that’ll make ur life misserable
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=Jrofaksum is a ghost who likes to take pictures but gets incredibly irrtated when a human appears and “spoils” one of them, behaviour worsens with time till Jrofaksum ekto-rottens to the core thus becomng {iii}evil… and truth is that there are so many of you humans everywhere that often to take a nice picture of say a geiser is a challenge
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It was far easier before the digital era.
Kodak launched a special film in the early 1940s,
named Ektochrome, the use of which made most
ghastly ghosts invisible.
Maybe that’s the real reason my Dad always used Ektachrome… 
Different spelling.
Indeed. And supposedly Ek**ta**chrome is coming back:
I dug up the video where I got it from:
About ghosts, the only way to be sure is to salt and burn the remains of course.
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I suppose that the chemistry behind this was not much less complex than today’s algorithms.
Nine replies but not one of them suggested a Darktable module to attempt repressing the purple ghosts…
Hard to get rid of such a large flare with a complex background like the link you shared.
If there are simpler flares, use darktable’s spot removal module. Otherwise shooting two exposures like @houz said is going to be best.
I agree with Mica, but… since you want some magic, there’s a module in DT that will absolutely 100% guaranteed or money back get rid of any ghost
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@Yossarian Welcome to the forum. I used dt a long time ago, but given the other responses, there probably isn’t a module that specifically deals with your particular problem.
Anyway, what I would do is try to recover as much detail as possible in dt (in your example, some detail is lost to clipping), go into GIMP (or another capable editor) and re-colorize the leaves where the flares are. There are also ways to fill in patches (formally called inpainting as @Jonas_Wagner describes below) but they require more skill to do successfully.
Yes, giving the sun the finger, thumb or some other object is popular for mitigating flares and can also act as a temp nd filter.
@chroma_ghost ha ha, you are so funny. I guess that is one solution.
thanks for sharing this video. I was just looking for a tutorial on flares
I did a quick web search and found two articles, written by one author, that address ghosting and flares. I quickly skimmed them and they seem legit. Take a look:
This is by far the most elegant solution. But if you are looking for a quick hack in post, inpainting mostly works in this case:
Done in gimp using the multiscale inpainting in gmic.
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Thanks Jonas_Wagner for trying the Gimp route… but to me going into Gimp “crosses the line” as far as photo touch-ups versus photo-shopping a capture.
After recovering the details, I would use multiple colour/luminosity masks and a region/drawn mask or two with, for instance, the colour zones module, again, multiple instances. With some patience, this should enable usable results.