Fixing "dark eyes"?

seeker · June 4, 2007

I have an image that I shot at a friend's wedding that wasn't all that bad with the exception of the shadows around the bride's eyes. In my view it just totally ruins the entire photo.

I shot the picture using my 70-200 from a distance and simply did not have the time to grab the flash from my car. The results (unfortunately) speak for themselves.

I have tried using the Photoshop shadow/highlight tool to selectively brighten up the area around her eyes, but to no avail. Even when I use the shadow slider at 100%, it still does not get rid of *all* of the shadows. Furthermore, I am having a very difficult time blending in the "fixed up" selection with the remainder of the photo. I am using the history brush to "paint back" what was originally there around the edges of the selection, but it just doesn't seem to give me what I am looking for.

Any thoughts on a different technique or how to augment the one I am using? Or is this a totally wasted photo?

- Brian

CathieT · June 4, 2007

Hi Brian,

www.atncentral.com has a heap of free downloads one of which is called Painting with Light.

This basically creates a duplicate layer and allows you to paint "light" and "shadow" wherever you need them.

Best of all - totally free!!

C

Shane422 · June 4, 2007

I am no expert by far, but my technique is to create a duplicate layer, set the clone brush to about 30% with very soft edges, and clone from a lighter portion of the face that I would like to nearly match. You can change the opacity of the layer to fine tune it in the end.

I tried using the dodge brush, but the 30% clone worked the best for me.

pyrtek · June 5, 2007

You can also try to paint with white on an empty Soft Light layer with a
soft brush. Start off with a really low opacity (5 - 10%) and see how that
goes.

jfriend · June 5, 2007

Try an overlay layer

seeker wrote:

I have an image that I shot at a friend's wedding that wasn't all that bad with the exception of the shadows around the bride's eyes. In my view it just totally ruins the entire photo.

I shot the picture using my 70-200 from a distance and simply did not have the time to grab the flash from my car. The results (unfortunately) speak for themselves.

I have tried using the Photoshop shadow/highlight tool to selectively brighten up the area around her eyes, but to no avail. Even when I use the shadow slider at 100%, it still does not get rid of *all* of the shadows. Furthermore, I am having a very difficult time blending in the "fixed up" selection with the remainder of the photo. I am using the history brush to "paint back" what was originally there around the edges of the selection, but it just doesn't seem to give me what I am looking for.

Any thoughts on a different technique or how to augment the one I am using? Or is this a totally wasted photo?

- Brian

There are many, many different ways to fix small areas of brightness. For images that I can find no other way besides hand painting on a mask to fix, my favorite way of doing this is to use an overlay layer and gradually paint on it. To do so:

Create a new blank layer, set it to overlay blend mode
Then fill it with 127, 127, 127 gray. The overlay blend mode will make the underlying image brighter when the layer contains something lighter than middle gray and will make things darker when it's darker than middle gray. So, when it's at middle gray, it should have no effect. The lighter it is, the more it will lighten, the darker it is, the more it will darken.
Select the brush tool
Set it to a soft brush and adjust the size to about 1/2 the size of the dark circles in the girl's eyes
Set the brush opacity to about 8%
Set the color of the brush to white (we want to lighten, so painting with a 9% white brush will gently lighten with each brush stroke).
Then delicately paint in a bit of a circle over the dark circles of the girl's eyes. Repeat with multiple brush strokes to gradually build up the effect. Using multple manually applied brush strokes will guarantee that each brush stroke has a little randomness to the position so, in addition to the soft edge of the brush stroke, the edge of your painting area will have some variability to it. You should slowly see the effect come into view. Toggle the overlay layer visibility on or off to see the sum total of your effect. Feel free to undo any recent brush strokes if you've gone too far.
Then, increase your brush size to about 2/3 of the man's head.
Paint over his head with several strokes to lighten his whole face.
Then, again make a smaller brush about 2/3 the size of his eye sockets. Then, gently lighten just his eye sockets.
When you're all done, toggle the effect on/off. If you feel like you've gone too far in the overall effect, you can dial back to opacity of the overlay layer.
If you've overdone it in just one place, you can change your brush to black, leave it at the 8% opacity and gently darken those areas you've gone too far on.
If you want to "reset" one area of the photo, you can set your brush opacity to 100% and set your brush color to 127,127,127. Anywhere you paint on the overlay will re-initialize the overlay layer and remove all previous custom painting in this area.

One of the reasons I love using this technique (when I can't find natural masks in the image to use) is that the overlay layer technique is 100% non-destructive. At any time, you can reverse the effect or re-initialize one area to start over.

If you find this would be useful on future images, it's really easy to create an action that creates the blank layer, sets it to the overlay blend mode, gives is a descriptive name, then fills it with neutral gray.

I always prefer this method over the actual burn and dodge tools because it's completely non-destructive. There's a brief summary of a few techniques here.

Here's the result I got on your image with the overlay technique. The difficult spot is where the dark eye socket intersects the brightest spot on the woman's face (on her right cheek). I didn't spend a lot of time in that area, but wanted to demonstrate the basic technique so you could work it yourself.

And your original:

pathfinder · June 5, 2007

Shooting in dappled lighting - bright sunlight streaming through leaves or in your case bare tree branches - can be very dangerous.

I have had several shots ruined by it - I have learned to ALWAYS seek out total shade instead. It is very difficult to edit out the contrasty variations due to dappled lighting. Fill flash can help, but it is better to just avoid it entirely.

I speak from not infrequent experience here:D

jfriend · June 5, 2007

pathfinder wrote:

Shooting in dappled lighting - bright sunlight streaming through leaves or in your case bare tree branches - can be very dangerous.

I have had several shots ruined by it - I have learned to ALWAYS seek out total shade instead. It is very difficult to edit out the contrasty variations due to dappled lighting. Fill flash can help, but it is better to just avoid it entirely.

I speak from not infrequent experience here:D

I also have painfully learned this lesson (too many times). The dappled sunlight looks cute to the naked eye and looks horrible to the camera and the resulting image. I have a couple of the round, collapsible shades (one opaque and one partially translucent) on my shopping list just for those circumstances where the ideal setting has some of these dapples that need to be blocked. Fill flash, in this case, would not have removed the dapples (without overpowering the scene), but would have avoided the racoon eyes.

pathfinder · June 5, 2007

jfriend wrote:

I also have painfully learned this lesson (too many times). The dappled sunlight looks cute to the naked eye and looks horrible to the camera and the resulting image. I have a couple of the round, collapsible shades (one opaque and one partially translucent) on my shopping list just for those circumstances where the ideal setting has some of these dapples that need to be blocked. Fill flash, in this case, would not have removed the dapples (without overpowering the scene), but would have avoided the racoon eyes.

Great comment, John.

I can't emphasize this comment enough!! Dappled light does look fine to the naked eye - if you do not understand how it will look in print. But in print, it makes you cringe if you ever even get to print. I have learned to look much more carefully in the shade of leaves and tree limbs than I ever used to.

As you siaid, even fill flash won't solve the problem, altho it can diminish how apparent it is. Translucent scrims or opaque screens to create shade without the dappled light are what the movies use.

seeker · June 7, 2007

Excellent!

jfriend wrote:

There are many, many different ways to fix small areas of brightness. For images that I can find no other way besides hand painting on a mask to fix, my favorite way of doing this is to use an overlay layer and gradually paint on it. To do so:
Create a new blank layer, set it to overlay blend mode

Then fill it with 127, 127, 127 gray. The overlay blend mode will make the underlying image brighter when the layer contains something lighter than middle gray and will make things darker when it's darker than middle gray. So, when it's at middle gray, it should have no effect. The lighter it is, the more it will lighten, the darker it is, the more it will darken.

Select the brush tool

Set it to a soft brush and adjust the size to about 1/2 the size of the dark circles in the girl's eyes

Set the brush opacity to about 8%

Set the color of the brush to white (we want to lighten, so painting with a 9% white brush will gently lighten with each brush stroke).

Then delicately paint in a bit of a circle over the dark circles of the girl's eyes. Repeat with multiple brush strokes to gradually build up the effect. Using multple manually applied brush strokes will guarantee that each brush stroke has a little randomness to the position so, in addition to the soft edge of the brush stroke, the edge of your painting area will have some variability to it. You should slowly see the effect come into view. Toggle the overlay layer visibility on or off to see the sum total of your effect. Feel free to undo any recent brush strokes if you've gone too far.

Then, increase your brush size to about 2/3 of the man's head.

Paint over his head with several strokes to lighten his whole face.

Then, again make a smaller brush about 2/3 the size of his eye sockets. Then, gently lighten just his eye sockets.

When you're all done, toggle the effect on/off. If you feel like you've gone too far in the overall effect, you can dial back to opacity of the overlay layer.

If you've overdone it in just one place, you can change your brush to black, leave it at the 8% opacity and gently darken those areas you've gone too far on.

If you want to "reset" one area of the photo, you can set your brush opacity to 100% and set your brush color to 127,127,127. Anywhere you paint on the overlay will re-initialize the overlay layer and remove all previous custom painting in this area.

One of the reasons I love using this technique (when I can't find natural masks in the image to use) is that the overlay layer technique is 100% non-destructive. At any time, you can reverse the effect or re-initialize one area to start over.

If you find this would be useful on future images, it's really easy to create an action that creates the blank layer, sets it to the overlay blend mode, gives is a descriptive name, then fills it with neutral gray.

I always prefer this method over the actual burn and dodge tools because it's completely non-destructive. There's a brief summary of a few techniques here.

Here's the result I got on your image with the overlay technique. The difficult spot is where the dark eye socket intersects the brightest spot on the woman's face (on her right cheek). I didn't spend a lot of time in that area, but wanted to demonstrate the basic technique so you could work it yourself.

And your original:

Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to lay out the exact steps I need to go through. I realize that this will take me some time, but that's ok as I am going to do this with only this image.

As I was not the photographer for this wedding (best man, actually), I didn't bring all of my equipment with me (reflectors, etc), plus I had very limited time to fire off a couple shots. I will definitely pay more attention in the future, but hopefully this technique will allow me to recover the photo.

Thanks again ... I will try it out and post the results!

- Brian

gfxartist · June 7, 2007

Here is a method that I sometimes use:

Create a duplicate layer of the photo, as we will be "airbrushing" it. You'll have the original layer in case you oops.
Zoom in on the face so you can work well around features such as eyes, lips, etc. with the brush. (On this photo I was working at 400%)
Select the eye dropper tool and sample a good area of the skin color near the shadow you are trying to lighten.
Select your brush tool and make sure it's a round soft brush w/ the size appropriate for the area you are working on. In this case I was using 13% hardness (pick what you like) and brush size from 10 to 15 (or smaller or larger depending on the area I was working on).
In the painting Mode drop down box, select "Lighten"
Make sure the brush Opacity is very low, I was using around 9%.
Make several passes over the dark area with your brush. Because you have selected "Lighten," you are only going to lighten those pixels that are darker than the color you sampled with the eyedropper. You are, in effect, lightening w/ the color you selected. This is why you want to use a low opacity b/c you can build up the color as you make passes w/ your brush. What's great is that (just as with the 50% gray overlay method) the pixels lighter than the one you sampled will not be affected.
The opposite can be done to darken the skin. The bride had a highlight above her upper lip. Instead of selecting "Lighten" for the brush mode, you will select "Darken." Sample the shadow above her lip, then use your brush to "darken" the highlighted triangle.

I constantly sample color around the area that I'm airbrushing so as to make it match more seamlessly w/ the area that I'm trying to lighten. Here is the photo using this method on the bride. (I also converted to Lab to use the Curves adjustment and took some of the yellow out, which I thought made the bride's dress look more white and the groom's vest look more of a soft cream.) I hope you find the method that works for you, and good luck touching up the photo!

JimW · June 9, 2007

jfriend wrote:

Then fill it with 127, 127, 127 gray.

I would like to try jfriend's method but I'm stuck on one silly little thing. I've never learned how to simply fill a blank layer with a custom made gray, and I can't seem to figure it out. I'm using CS2.

Please, could use a little help. Thanks.

Jim

jfriend · June 9, 2007

JimW wrote:

jfriend wrote:

I would like to try jfriend's method but I'm stuck on one silly little thing. I've never learned how to simply fill a blank layer with a custom made gray, and I can't seem to figure it out. I'm using CS2.

Please, could use a little help. Thanks.

Jim

There are a bunch of ways to do this. Here's one.

Layer/New Layer
Select Overlay as the "Mode" in the new layer dialog.
This will then enable a checkbox at the bottom of the dialog that says: "Fill with Overlay-neutral color (50% gray)". Check that box and then hit OK.

If you already have a blank layer set to the overlay blend mode, you can also use Edit/Fill and pick 50% gray from the "Use:" drop-down.

JimW · June 9, 2007

Bingo - thanks John.

seeker · June 9, 2007

Excellent!

gfxartist wrote:

Here is a method that I sometimes use:
Create a duplicate layer of the photo, as we will be "airbrushing" it. You'll have the original layer in case you oops.

Zoom in on the face so you can work well around features such as eyes, lips, etc. with the brush. (On this photo I was working at 400%)

Select the eye dropper tool and sample a good area of the skin color near the shadow you are trying to lighten.

Select your brush tool and make sure it's a round soft brush w/ the size appropriate for the area you are working on. In this case I was using 13% hardness (pick what you like) and brush size from 10 to 15 (or smaller or larger depending on the area I was working on).

In the painting Mode drop down box, select "Lighten"

Make sure the brush Opacity is very low, I was using around 9%.

Make several passes over the dark area with your brush. Because you have selected "Lighten," you are only going to lighten those pixels that are darker than the color you sampled with the eyedropper. You are, in effect, lightening w/ the color you selected. This is why you want to use a low opacity b/c you can build up the color as you make passes w/ your brush. What's great is that (just as with the 50% gray overlay method) the pixels lighter than the one you sampled will not be affected.

The opposite can be done to darken the skin. The bride had a highlight above her upper lip. Instead of selecting "Lighten" for the brush mode, you will select "Darken." Sample the shadow above her lip, then use your brush to "darken" the highlighted triangle.

I constantly sample color around the area that I'm airbrushing so as to make it match more seamlessly w/ the area that I'm trying to lighten. Here is the photo using this method on the bride. (I also converted to Lab to use the Curves adjustment and took some of the yellow out, which I thought made the bride's dress look more white and the groom's vest look more of a soft cream.) I hope you find the method that works for you, and good luck touching up the photo!

You have definitely cleaned up the area around the eyes, but something doesn't seem right in the photo now. I think that her eyes look too puffy - perhaps because the shadow has been removed? I'm not quite sure what it is.

Regardless, the technique you have described sounds like another great way to deal with patchy lighting. I will give it a try! Thanks so much!

- Brian

GJMPhoto · June 10, 2007

"Puffy Eyes"
Personally, I think this retouch is spot-on...I've used both the overlay method and the lighten brush myself, depending on the problem facing me.

The beauty of either of these methods, is that the retouch is on its own layer, therefore, if you think the result is too much - hence your puffy eyes concern - you can just reduce the opacity on the layer, and the old shadow will return. Backing off the opacity gives you complete control over how much correction you want...and you can get the contouring you're missing.

Really nice job on that retouch.

BTW: When reducing natural blemishes or wrinkles, using the technique of a layer and backing off the opacity gives you the freedom to retouch to completely remove the imperfection, yet be able to reduce the effect to provide realism. Works great for 'bags' under the eyes, smile wrinkles, birth marks,etc...where you really don't want to completely eliminate the imperfection.

Fixing "dark eyes"?

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