Defeat car license plates in Lightroom

Make car license plates unrecognizable

For a while now, Adobe Lightroom has been my go-to photo editor for the photos I pimp. Today I had a shot of a golf park clubhouse with a couple of cars and license plates visible in the parking lot. Of course, these have to be made unrecognizable in order to protect data protection in relation to the license plates. With Adobe Lightroom 5 this is relatively easy:

The instruction

First, open the photo in the “Develop” tab. At the top of the menu there is a "Tools" section where you select the "Remove Region" tool. Alternatively, you can also press “Q” to get the tool. Now you zoom to the appropriate spot in the image and use the mouse wheel to select a brush size that is just large enough to cover the writing on the license plate. A brush stroke over the letters and numbers of the license plate is enough.

Make car license plates unrecognizable
It's that easy to make license plates illegible in Lightroom from Adobe.

If you let go of the mouse button, you will find a "button" around the license plate that shows where Lightroom gets the information from the image that is written about the license plate. I simply chose an area below the license plate number. The result is a smudged number plate on the car that no longer allows any conclusions to be drawn.

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4 Responses to “Redify License Plates in Lightroom”

  1. What do you do if the car is not white? ;) For something there is the soft focus or wiper finger, at least in Photoshop. I don't know what it looks like in Lightroom.

    1. Hi Andi! A good question. :)
      I think then you have to take the correction brush (K key) and maybe drag the "sharpness" to a negative range or increase the exposure so that the writing turns white. Lightroom 5 does not yet have a real blur brush or smudge brush. In Photoshop it's pretty simple...

      1. Thanks for your input, I was also looking for such a possibility, because I don't always want to use Photoshop for a rather rudimentary task.
        My conclusion: Correction brush and a combination of (in) sharpness and + brightness brings a very passable result.

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