Removing Dark Circles Under Eyes in Photoshop

Intro:

Here’s how you can remove those dark circles under the eyes using photoshop. I’ve provided screenshots and instructions to ease you through this.

We’re going to use this degenerate photo for this lesson. I took this picture from EveryStockPhoto.com since they have free stock photos. You may want to use their service if you like amateur photos that look like poo. So, on to the lesson!

Tutorial Lesson:

Here is our subject

As you can see, the photo quality sucks, but even more important is the fact that this young lady has some huge bags under her eyes! Let’s see if we can fix this.

We’re going to use the patch tool to work on this image. You can use this image to follow along in photoshop, or you can use one of your own.

If you wish to use this image, right click it and select copy image. Open a new file in photoshop (Ctrl-N or Command-N on a mac) and hit enter. Now press Ctrl-V (Mac: Command-V). Whew, now that we have that squared away, let’s get to the lesson.

Select the patch tool and draw a line around the dark circles like you see in the picture, you may need to press z to select the zoom tool and zoom in on the eyes. After you’ve successfully selected the area to be edited, click somewhere inside of the dotted line and drag your cursor to a clean spot on the face. You need to be certain that you don’t get the edge of a nose, or anything like that in the area you drag to. When you’re satisfied with your choice of selection, let go of the left click button.

This is normally a one step process, but the dark circles under these eyes are so big I found I had to repeat the process over several areas of the face. Don’t be afraid to experiment. When you are finished, you should have something like the image below.

dark circles fixed

When You’re all finished, press Ctrl-D (Mac: Command-D) to deselect the area and you’ll see that the dark circles are completely gone! You can also use the healing brush to repair dark circles, but the patch tool works so well that I prefer it over all other methods. You can look at the images below to see the dramatic differences between before and after.

Baggy Eyes Fixed

Baggy Eyes