From the course: Photoshop and Lightroom: Portrait Retouching in the Age of AI

Fixing shadows under the eyes with AI

From the course: Photoshop and Lightroom: Portrait Retouching in the Age of AI

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Fixing shadows under the eyes with AI

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- [Chris] So far, we've been talking a lot about how to use the remove tool to remove something completely. But what about those situations where you just want to lessen the intensity of something. Like with this portrait that I captured of this mom and her little cute daughter there, let's say that she says, "Hey Chris, I have not been sleeping well. I have these dark areas under my eyes. Could you just kind of lessen those somehow?" And we say, "Of course, sure, no problem." In other words, sometimes we'll have a wrinkle, a scar, a shadow that we just want to diminish. How do we do that? Well we navigate over to the remove tool. Here I will use generative AI. And with generative AI, I'm going to leave my opacity up at 100. I'll choose a brush size that's a little bit bigger than the area I'm working on, so I'll make it a little smaller using the left bracket key. And then I'm just going to paint over this part of the image, and then I'll also paint over on this part of the image as well. Next, click Apply. And essentially what this is going to do is tell Lightroom that, "Hey, there's an area where I've painted as you know that I want to change, I want to get rid of, I want to modify." But the way that AI works is it's a little bit more intelligent than that. So you can see that as we click through, it's giving me various options for this eye over here. I'll press the H key. You can see the area that it's focused on. If I find a decent adjustment, but it's just too strong, well that's where I change the opacity value. Let me zoom in even further because I'm not sure how you'll be able to see that, but I'm just kind of taking that shadow back so it's not quite so strong. And often in retouching, we need to do this. I can move over to the other area and click through to see which one I kind of like best. And then again, find just the right value there on that. And then of course, click and hold the before and after, and then zoom out. Make sure you're not going too far with this. But in this case, I think this is kind of a nice little touch. The shadow isn't quite as strong, and it looks beautiful and wonderful. Now when it comes to making decisions like this in regards to, well, how much do you do? Do you completely take something away or just diminish it? It really depends upon your own style. But hopefully you can see here that we can use generative AI stylistically. In other words, we don't need to just accept what it gives us. We have complete control, and that control for me a lot of time comes into play with the opacity slider there.

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