Remove dark skin under eyes and moustache area

[creeker69]

I have searched the forums but cannot find any help for this in PSP. Lots of videos for dark circles under eyes for Photoshop but I can't find what I am looking for with PSP.

Here's my situation. I took some portraits at the beach of my 27 y/old niece. I did (IMHO) a pretty decent job of blemish repair and skin smoothing.

But, she had had some botox injections in her upper lip. From the profile, her upper lip (to me) looks too much like a duck lip, but it is what it is.

My issue is that when shooting her from the front, the area above her lips looks darker than the rest of her skin and almost looks like a moustache. The darkness under her nose is about the shade of the darkness under many eyes.

I have tried the clone brush but when it gets close to the philtrun (that the little ridge under a nose between the nostrils) it makes it a mess. Also the clone brush does not do a good job of blending at all in this case.

I also tried the VIVEZA 2 plugin to lighten the area under the lip but can't get the drop point small enough and it makes it noticeable worse.

I don't work well with layers but I was thing that if I had two layers and brightened one layer then lightly brushed or blended it on the other layer, that that might work. I can't figure out how to do that, btw.

Does anyone have a video of how to? Any advice?

This is my first posting so not sure if I could upload a picture to demonstrate or not.

Thanks in advance,
Ron

[Jean-Luc]

You could put here a picture (area between eyes and chin) and someone here could make a video showing how to do it...

[hartpaul]

I do this often.
1. Duplicate your layer and then hide the top layer and make the bottom layer active.
2. Adjust the bottom layer so that the part you want corrected is the correct tonality as the top correct sections. Flick the visibility of the top layer on and off for quick comparisons.
3. Once correct turn the top layer on and make it active.
4. Then use the eraser brush set to very soft and low opacity 9 try soft 10 and opacity about 10.
5. Slowly erase away the darker parts of the top layer to blend it in with the lower corrected layer. If you go too far then right click and run over it a few times to unerase (I don't think Photoshop has this feature).

I had taken a portrait of a young girl who through a bit of a crying tizzy when her mother did her hair the wrong way. She had puffy eyes, and reddened areas and flushed face. I used RGB on the lower layer to correct the color and then used the eraser brush to slowly remove the redness from the upper layer and allow the lower layer to show through. Bit of soft cloning to reduce he puffy eyes.
You could also use a mask layer to do the same thing switching from white to black to paint on the mask as required, but since you said you are not that familiar with layers, talking about masks would just bring more confusion in.

[creeker69]

hartpaul,

This was my very first attempt at repairing with layers. It worked perfectly using your procedure and your hardness and opacity numbers.

I used the Dodge brush to brighten the dark area. I played around with hardness and opacity, size and concentrated on the overall color.

Then erased as you said and it really made a great difference.

Thank you ever so much.