When I went to Scott Kelby’s excellent Photoshop for Digital Photographers course last year, one of his stories was of spending a day photographing a Bride, and only realising later when he sat down to edit the photographs that she had a considerable mark on her shoulder.
On Friday I was photographing a client, and feeling fairly on top of getting a reasonable Head and Shoulders portrait, even down to making sure I had whites showing either side of their irises, and not just having a black spot in the corner of the eye.
Then I read the card into the computer, popped the images up to full screen, and saw it. The client had a lazy eye, not only that, but the lazy eye was the dominant eye in the required viewer-left facing picture. Suddenly something which one did not notice in normal interaction looked huge, and almost overwhelmed the rest of the image.
Without showing you the picture as I don’t want to identify the client, here’s how to fix it (or make someone with normal vision appear cross-eyed)
- Start with normal portrait eye corrections — vein reduction, screen overlay to brighten etc.
- Flatten to a new top layer: Shift-alt-cmd-E
- select the Iris, and the white of the eye on the side away from where the eye is to move, feather and pop it (cmd-J) onto a new layer.
- move and transform until the eye is looking in the correct direction, the white you selected should cover the iris on the layer below that was looking in the old direction
- add a layer mask to constrain the new eye within the eyelids, and expose any eyelashes
- finish with clearing any visible joins
Isn’t Photoshop wonderful?