Specific Removing dark circles / darkness below eye

[blasteralfred]

Hi,

I was trying to achieve this. I have a portrait and there is skin darkening below eyes. What immediately below the eye is affordable. But there is dark patch near to the nose and on top of nose.

I tried making a selection using pen tool and adjusting Levels and Brightness settings. But this creates some color mismatch with rest of the skin. I dont know how to achieve this.

I am posting the images (sample + marked). I hope some Guru can help me on this.

Thank you Gurus.

 

[ZeroCool22]

Something like this?:

V2:
​

 

[Rich54]

If you want to do this yourself there are a few ways, depending on your skill level. Probably the best way is a technigue called Frequency Separation, which allows you to change the skin color without changing the texture, but it's a somewhat advanced technique and not everyone will be ready to try it. For a simpler approach, I used the Clone Stamp and a layer mask.

On a new layer, use the Clone Stamp to replace the dark areas of the nose and eyes with nearby samples of lighter skin. For this first step, it doesn't need to be perfect. Here is what I got, but it's obvious that I did too much in many spots:



Next, apply a layer mask to this new layer and fill the mask entirely with black. This gets you back to the original image. Now use a soft brush and set the Flow to something very small... I used 5%. Using this brush, start painting with white in the layer mask to very slowly bring back the lighter skin from the Clone Stamp. Take your time and go very slowly. The idea is to very gradually lighten the skin and have very smooth transitions so that there is no obvious border with mismatched skin. Make sure to retain the shadows that define the actual shape of the nose because you want the person to still look the same. I only spent 5 minutes on this, but here's what I got.



As a final step, I added a bit of Noise to the lightened area to increase the texture.

 

[blasteralfred]

WOW @Rich54 That was Amazing... Lemme try your tutorial..

 

[blasteralfred]

View attachment 90240

@Rich54 how to remove the bulges from top of nose? There are slight projections on both sides of top of nose. How to remove that, so thast that part becomes straight (normal nose shape)? I have made an attempt using clone + eraser. But it is not perfect. Lemme post what I did, the pic + pic marked.

 

[Rich54]

There are almost always several ways to achieve a result. To narrow that small area of the nose, the Liquify filter would work well. Below is what I got using Liquify. Similar to the clone stamp method, after you're done using the Liquify filter you might accidentally affect a larger area than you need. Mask it out with black and then gradually bring the correction back using a brush with 5% Flow to only the areas that need to change, and blend it into the original image so that there are no obvious seams or transitions.

 

[blasteralfred]

@Rich54