Awkward Shadow on Face

Hi all,
I'm still relatively new to portraits (I have traditionally done sports and a lot of candid shooting) and took the following image in a set of senior pictures the other day. I am happy with most of the image except the shadow next to the left eye caused by her fingers. If I can fix the entire shadow on the left side of the face that would be ideal but the part that really bugs me is the part caused by the fingers.

The obvious solution was to see this at the time and reposition accordingly but I somehow missed the mark there.

So far in lightroom I have been attempting to clone/heal the skin around that area and overlay it to where the shadow caused by the fingers is but without good results. Am I doing the right technique and just not executing or is there simply a better way?

Thanks for any suggestions!

A pixel based editor like Photoshop is much more suited to this task. There are some extremely talented people on here, I'm interested to see what they can come up with.

I've messed up a few portraits of family members in a similar manner and never could fix them to my satisfaction so I just left them alone and nobody complained.

Did you shoot raw? Can you provide a download link to the raw file?

kirk

This is just a quick edit in Photoshop using clone stamp, healing brush and patch. Would be better on a RAW file.

I wouldn't try to completely clone the entire shadow away; that'll look awkward and unnatural since her hand SHOULD be casting a shadow there. When there are no shadows where shadows should be, we subconsciously realize it. The shadow from her arm can't just stop at her chin and not exist on the rest of her face.

Getting rid of just a couple of finger shadows - as Dagolimaging has done above - will still look fine. But that's Photoshop work, not Lightroom.

I don't think Lightroom's pixel manipulation is up to the task. However, you could use the adjustment brush to brush over the shadowed area, and increase exposure and shadows. The shadow will still be there but it won't be nearly as objectionable. You may also have to adjust contrast and saturation to make it look right with the rest of the skin.

Thanks for the suggestions, I highly doubt this is the last time I will do something like this so learning how to correct it is very helpful.

I rarely do people shoots but when I do my rule is...take a lot of shots, rapidly.
It gives you more choices for the final outcome, and...
It make those "cut and paste" techniques a whole lot easier in PS.

Here's a quick take on the challenge of removing the shadow entirely. I cheated and used a no longer available piece of software called "Lightbrush" - its strong suit is being able to separate illumination from reflectance data with some user cues fed to the software - see screenshot. It also permits a rough clone of the reflectance and illumination channels - here I cloned out the illumination data in the shadow, using the illumination of the brightly lit face as the light information. This was done on the 8bit JPEG posted here - the results would be far superior with the raw file.

I then used the new composite to do cloning, doing and burning to bring the color and contrast of the new area into line with the rest of the face and sculpt some detail into the newly lit area. I also added higher frequency detail to mimic the freckles - I used the ACR filter and applied large, rough film grain to the image and then painted in the effect locally in the spots that the freckles appear in the original.

I did this with an Apple trackpad, so the precision is not so hot, but you get the idea. More time spent will yield better results. The continuation of the shadow on the subject's neck is not so completely out of context, so I left it in.

It is a shame that this software is no longer being developed, as it is really powerful in this exact situation.

kirk