From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

How do I fix dark circles? - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

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How do I fix dark circles?

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- If people don't get a good night's sleep, or as they get older, they start to get bags under the eyes. Little dark shadows. And sometimes by properly angling the flash or diffusing the light, you can minimize this. But some lighting conditions make it even worse. So let me show you a couple of strategies for removing this. Now, what we're going to do is open up two images here that both have a bit of dark circles. And my suggestion is just get things where you want them inside of Camera Raw, making any slight tweaks that you need to the overall image, and then open up the images. Now what you can do is make a new layer. If we zoom in to this layer, we can take advantage of the healing tool. My suggestion is that you choose the normal healing brush tool, so that you can be more specific about where the colors come from. Then tell it to sample all layers. What this will do is allow you to click on a sample point and then brush in under the bag on the eye. And it will attempt to blend. As you brush this, you'll see that it starts to build up the strokes. Just be careful where you set the sample point. And you might try also sampling off of a forehead, which tends to be a little bit smoother. There we go. And as you start to brush that in, what you'll see is that it begins to remove the bags under the eye. If I toggle that on and off, you see it does a pretty good job. Now, what's essential here is that you don't completely remove them. So, lowering the opacity down can do a nice job of blending that back in, so you get a little bit of a lightening, while minimizing the bag. The key there is to blend the two layers together, so that it looks more natural. Now, that did a pretty good job. You can see the eye on the left has been fixed, and the one on the right has not. Now, let's just sample that point. We'll come down here and brush that in a little bit. And that layer is still set to 50%. So when I release, it's going to blend a little bit. And you see that that does a nice job of cutting down on some of that under-the-eye glare and darker shadow, giving us more natural results. Now, just like before, if you're faced with the problem of this really bothering you, you can actually fix this by using a third party plugin. The one I'm going to show you is called Perfectly Clear, and it uses facial detection to find the eyes and make it easy to fix. Let's choose another image here. And I'll choose filter, Athentech Imaging, Perfectly Clear version three. And let's just zoom in here on the face. I can even click here and it will center it. And from the eyes controls, I have the ability to remove dark circles. And you see that that does a nice job of automatically recognizing the eyes and pulling that out. While we're here we can also take advantage of a little bit of eye enhance. That will sharpen the eyes and brighten them. And you can see that that really does a nice job of putting a little bit more light into the eyes there. And if they're squinting outdoors, like in this case the light's a little bright, I can even open her eyes a bit. And you see if I toggle that on and off, that it makes a slight change to the shape of the eye. There we go. That's a little bit too far, but let's take it all the way open. And then back down a little. And that works nicely. If you need to, you can also add a catchlight, if working in a studio environment, to add a glint. But if we take a look at that there side by side, you can see that the shadows have been nicely lifted, and a little bit of light has been added in. And when I click apply, the image is updated. Now, you can do this the manual method, and the healing brush does work quite well. Or if you're in a time-crunch, turn to a third party tool like this, which can actually target an area, fix it and then really quickly enhance it by relying upon face detection. It doesn't recognize the face, but rather it detects eyes and nose and knows where to correctly place the adjustment to save you some time.

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