Confessions of a Photoshopaholic: Part 2

This week we'll wrangle another photo problem with the lasso tool—how to get rid of an undesirable feature.

If you didn't catch last week's blog entry on how to fix blinking in photos, you might want to check it out, as it utilizes many of the same tools and methods we'll be using here.

This week's photo example may look fine to the casual observer, but if you look closely, you can see that a couple days of walking around Disney has taken its toll on me—causing those unsightly dark circles under my eyes. Let's see what we can do in Photoshop so I won't be embarrassed to print this one out for my scrapbook!

Focusing In On the Problem
First we open a copy of the photo; we don't want to mess with the original in case something goes wrong. Photo editing can take a lot of trial and error sometimes.



Zoom in to the area we'll be working in (using the Zoom Tool or Ctrl + ), in this case the eyes. I'll be using the Lasso Tool with the Feather value set to 9 (like last week's example, this value may vary depending on the size/resolution of the photo and the area you're working on). Select the darkened area underneath the eyes, making sure you're on the more generous side—it's better to use a larger area and delete some of the excess later.

Edit: Copy (ctrl c) the selection, then Edit: Paste (ctrl v) and this selection will be a new layer. Photoshop can be a bit odd sometimes about the placement of pasted selections, so if it's not quite in the same place, you can use the Move Tool to nudge it a bit left/right/up/down.




Trial and Error
Hang in there, this next part entails more trial and error. First we go into Image: Adjustments: Brightness/Contrast. I'll try these settings: Brightness = 32, Contrast = - 9.

Make sure you have the "Preview" option checked, and you can see we end up with an area that's much too light around the dark circle part. Let's fix that next before we get too far. The main thing we're aiming for is to get the color of the area under the eyes to be similar to the area near the cheeks.








Using the lasso tool again with the same feather as before, select the area that's a bit too light and press Delete—I'll usually do this a little bit at a time, so I don't go too far into the section we're keeping. If it looks like you've deleted too much, Edit:Undo (Ctrl z) to go back a step (or Edit: Step Backward more than once to go back more steps).






Finishing Touches
At this point, there's still somewhat of a darkened line that I'm not too thrilled with on my right undereye area. Repeating the process we just completed—selecting the darker area, copying and pasting it, and tweaking the brightness/contrast will lend some pretty decent results.

This time I used a feather of 6 on the Lasso Tool since the area is smaller, and I only bumped the brightness up by +8.




You can use the layers panel to check the before and after; click the eyeball next to the layer to turn the layer visibility off so you can see the layer below it.

I'm pretty happy with the way this looks now, so I'm going to merge the lightened undereye layer by right clicking on the layer in the layers panel and selecting "Merge Down". If you have multiple layers, you can ctrl click to select more than one layer, then right click on one of them and select "Merge Layers".

That's it—no more dark circles under my eyes and I look like I'm ready to take on the Tea Cup ride!