How can I retouch flash-whitened eyebrows so they look natural?
Asked 6/27/2016
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2 answers
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In some birthday-party photos, flash caused the subject’s eyebrows to look pale/grey with patchy off-white areas under the hairs, likely from a cosmetic product that only showed up under flash. The goal is to make the eyebrows look naturally darker again in key images, even if the result is slightly idealized as long as it looks believable.
What’s a good retouching approach for this? I have mostly JPEGs, with a few RAW files, and the issue appears across files from several cameras. I’ve tried cloning from other photos, but matching the hair texture and direction hasn’t worked well.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
1
I am not a pro in editing, but I would try to select the affected areas in LightRoom (or Photoshop), and reduce the brightness of the bright areas ('Highlights' slider). Alternatively, you could change the curves and basically cut off the high end.
Both should result in the bright, whitish areas becoming less white and bright, and blend in better.
There are techniques in Photoshop to select the affected areas by color or hue, or even more clever, and that gives you more control and better effect, but I don't know how to do that. Anyone that knows Photoshop should be able to tell you that though.
Originally by user46784. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user46784
10y ago
0
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A practical first step is to retouch the eyebrows locally rather than trying to rebuild them hair-by-hair.
Use Lightroom or Photoshop to select just the affected eyebrow areas, then reduce the brightness of the pale patches. Lowering highlights is the simplest approach; alternatively, use Curves and pull down the bright end to suppress the whitish areas so they blend back into the natural brow tone.
If you have Photoshop, a more controlled method is to make the selection by color/hue so you target only the lightened cream-affected areas instead of darkening the whole eyebrow. That usually gives a cleaner, more natural result.
RAW files will give you more latitude, but the same local-brightness correction can still help on JPEGs. Since cloning full eyebrows from other images hasn’t matched well, tonal correction of the existing brows is likely the better path, with only minimal cloning if needed afterward.
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