Removing light halos in lightroom or photoshop

Question

Are there any good techniques for reducing halos around lights in night shots?

For example this photo

Maybe it's impossible but I'm just wondering if there is any filter, plugin, technique that can relatively automagically remove or tone down the halos from the lights without losing the details of the stuff behind the lights. Or rather I know the details of the stuff behind the lights are lost but the structure is not so with the right processing you should be able to get something that looks like the lights had no halos and those areas might look a little .... solarized (low res color) but otherwise it seems possible.

Yea, I know that seems like magic but there's something about it that seems like it might be as possible as content aware scaling so I'm just wondering if there's a solution anyone is aware of.

Answer 1

If you shot RAW, then you can possibly use recovery to get back some of it, but fundamentally, the issue is that detail is lost in over-exposed areas and halos tend to block out the detail behind them, so automatic replacement would be difficult. It generally requires some love and affection with a brush and some gradient tools to fix well in my experience.