Tip Thursday - getting rid of dark circles

If you are anything like me, you take a lot of photos in bad indoor lighting, thus needing to use a flash. So I use an external flash which is usually pointet upwards as to have the light bounce back off the roof. Well, sometimes this makes for some bad shadows, or extra dark circles under the eyes, if you will. So here's a tip on how to quickly get rid of them (or other miscolorations for that matter) in Photoshop. Here's what you can do:

Select the Clone Tool
Up on the menu bar, change the setting of the Clone Tool to Mode: Lighten, Opacity 20,
and make sure Sample All Layers is checked (this is so you can do the corrections on a separate layer).
Make a new layer above your photo layer.
With the Clone Tool, sample a lighter area (by holding down the Alt key/Option key and clicking) close to where you'll be correcting.

Now you can easily brush over the dark circles and watch them disappear.
Lastly, I would suggest lowering the opacity of the adjusted layer to make it look a little more natural, you know, not too polished. :)

Here is a before and after example:

 

Comments

[Laurie]

you're AWESOME Eva! nice work... thanks for the tip!

[Garynka]

Thanks for the cool tip Eva! Now I can be beautiful on the pictures too, lol! (I have a dark circles under my eyes every day...)

[Kirsten aka Kikon]

Thank you so much for that tip Eva!!