Snappin’ Sunday: Dark Circles be Gone

I love Photoshop.  With a few quick brush strokes, I can be skinny, have perfect skin, the brightest eyes and the whitest teeth.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could brush our flaws away as easily in real life?   Today I thought I’d share a quick Photoshop fix that I use quite a lot.  I don’t know what it is about my family, but we all seem to have dark circles under our eyes.  Maybe it’s genetic or due to allergies.  Maybe we’re just tired.  I don’t know.  In any event, I don’t like them so I choose to lighten them up a bit.

Here’s a cute picture of my youngest son I chose to use as an example.   This picture is SOOC. He’s looking cute as can be but he has noticeable dark under eye circles.

First you’ll want to duplicate your background layer. You always want to make adjustments to a duplicate layer so you don’t accidentally wreck the original copy of your image.

Once you’ve done that, select the Patch tool from your tool bar. I use CS4 and it appears here.

Make sure your duplicate layer is selected, grab your Patch tool and draw a line around the dark spot under the eye that you would like lightened.

Once you’ve selected the dark circle, click and drag the circle to a spot close to the eye that isn’t affected by the dark circles. Of course, you’ll need to repeat this for the other eye and then Deselect the Patch tool. Once I finished this step, my image looked like this.

Now his eyes dark circles are gone but his eyes don’t look natural. I need to reduce the opacity of the duplicate layer. For this image, I brought the opacity of the duplicate layer down to 40% and here is the final result.

Much Better.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this Sunday’s little tip. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Tiki