dark circles under the eyes

[msvadi]

Does anybody know how to remove dark circles under the eyes? I was really surprised that Katrin Eismann's "Photoshop restoration and retouching" had nothing on this topic. The only technique I could find on the web involved sampling pixels near dark circles and painting over with a brush on a duplicate layer. I wonder if one can do better than that.

[Scottes]

Try cloning from the cheek, but set the Mode to Lighten, and Opacity to 50%.

[ohenry]

The healing brush works very well for this application

[maderito]

Another way to selectively lighten:

Create a lighter copy of your image. I prefer to duplicate the image to a new layer, set the layer blend mode to screen, copy this lighter image to a new layer and then delete the original copy.

Now you have your original image as the bottom layer and a lighter version on top. Set the blend mode to lighten. Add a layer mask and fill it with black (click the "Add Layer Mask" button in the layers pallette while holding Alt). Reduce the opacity to about 50%.

Now paint on the layer mask with a soft, white brush. Adjust the opacity of the layer to fine-tune the result. You can also adjust the opacity of your brush and, of course, alternate between black/white color to add to or correct your painting.

Using the lighten blending mode (here or in Scotte's method) gives a more natural result since you are not changing every pixel - only those in which the luminance of the blend layer is higher than that of the base layer. You can further fine tune this effect by setting the "blend if" sliders in the layer style options.

[msvadi]

Thanks, guys :)