Photoshop quick fix: Scott Kelby shows how to correct for a portrait with one eye partly closed
posted Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at 5:59 AM EDT
At some point, it happens to all of us: If you shoot enough portraits, eventually someone is going to squint or start to blink an eye. If you're lucky, you can just shoot the photo again. But what if you've already lost the moment, or you didn't catch the problem until you got home? Do you throw the image away, or perhaps just live with one drooping eyelid in your shot?
Photographer and Photoshop guru Scott Kelby provides a rather happier alternative: Fixing the image in just a couple of minutes with a few handy Photoshop tools. In his five-minute short "Photoshop Retouch: Fixing an eye that's not open as wide as the other", Kelby runs you through the technique -- and it couldn't really be much easier.
As you'll see in the clip above, the technique relies on your being able to borrow a mirrored copy of your subjects other eye. (That is, the one which is fully opened. If they're squinting with both eyes, this trick isn't going to work for you, alas.)
But there's a little more to it than that. If you simply mirror their eye and then mask it in nicely, the overlaid eye isn't likely to look right without a little work. But with just a tiny bit more effort, you can correct for these problems and make a pretty good correction, perhaps saving your image.
If you liked this clip, be sure to browse the KelbyOne YouTube channel. And if you're still hungry for more, perhaps consider signing up for a monthly or annual subscription over at the KelbyOne website. For as little as $17 per month paid annually, you'll get access to tens of thousands of lessons covering topics including photography, Photoshop, Lightroom and plenty else besides...