Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Open Closed Eyes with Elements

This time we're gonna move into working in the expert mode of the editor. So we're gonna select a couple of other images, and bring those in. So let's bring this photo, and I'm gonna hold down command or control and bring this photo and this photo. So I've got one, two, three images selected, and I'll click the editor button. This is incidentally the same thing as going to the editor and choosing file open. The difference is when you go through the file menu like this, file, open, then you have to navigate your hard drive and find the photos which obviously can be a mess. That's why we need the organizer. So, it might be easier and more efficient to do what we've just done, which is from the organizer, select what you want, and then just click the editor. But they're the same thing. They're just different ways to open images into the editor workspace. So, here we are in the editor workspace, and personally my favorite place to be is over in expert mode because it's just less wizardry. ...

You can have a lot more control over the things that you are creating. But, it still has a lot of automated features and things to speed up the process and help you out a little bit. So, I wanna show you this cool feature here where we're gonna try to fix this guy's blinked eyes. So, if we zoom in, we can see his eyes are mid-blinked, like halfway so they're totally closed. So, we're gonna adjust this by choosing enhance and there's this new feature called open closed eyes and that's pretty cool. That's a really common problem that I've taught people for years how to fix and now Adobe just comes along and gives you a magic wand to just do it. So, that's pretty cool. Let's see how it works. So, it's recognizing his face and the fact that he has closed eyes. Now, I can choose a new source for eyes, I mean we're gonna do a transplant on this guy, and I can choose the source to be one of these sample images here, so maybe like this guy and if I click on it, it's gonna take this guy's eyes and mix them in and I have to say, I don't think that looks great. But, also because this guy has blue eyes, and these eyes are brown. So, that would be a pretty big giveaway that this wasn't right, but maybe her eyes. They're blue, we can click on those. (laughs) That just looks silly, so this could be also fun, just for some silliness as well. But, we can also use a photo that we have. So maybe we have another photo of him with his eyes open and let's see how that would work. So, I'm gonna click the organizer here and tell it that I wanna choose a photo from the organizer and it's gonna be like, "What do you wanna choose?" And I can tell it where to find it here, but because we have too many images in here, I can just see that it's right here. So, I'm gonna click to select it and I'll say "Add selected photos" and I'll say "Done." So now his face his face is right here, so I'm gonna click to apply his own face to his face and there we have it. So in this photo, he was wearing a silly hat, and the photo where he didn't have the silly hat on, he had his eyes closed. So that's a real common situation where you can actually borrow from another photo of the same person with their eyes open or you could even mix it up and just use another image if you really get desperate. So that's kind of a fun new thing, and once we've got that done, then he's ready to go. That really looks just fine I think. So, let's move on to another image here of this guy. So this guy's got his eyes closed, less than a blink situation and more of just he closed his eyes to take a pause for a minute. Maybe he's gathering himself, so he just closed his eyes for a moment. But maybe we really like this photo, but were just like "Aw man, I wish he hadn't closed his eyes". So, let's try the same thing. We could choose enhanced and we could say "Open closed eyes". And look at that! It's gonna say, "Hey, we didn't find" "any faces in this photo". Well, that's because, anytime that you have anything obscuring part of the face, it really can throw Elements off, so in this case his hand is covering half of his face, and his eyes are closed, so when Elements is searching, it's looking for eyes in relation to nose and mouth, and he's covering half his face, so it's not terribly surprising that it would get tripped up here a little bit. So, we're gonna have to manually fix this and I'm gonna show you how totally easy it is. So we happen to have this other image of him where his eyes are open and it's in the same lighting environment. It's a similar enough photo that it should be a pretty easy fix. So, to do that we're gonna make a really simple selection using the rectangular marquee tool right here and we only need one eye because that's all we see here. So, we'll go back to this image and I'm gonna click and drag to just draw a box around one of the eyes, and you'll notice when I did that, that I wasn't really that careful. Let me delete it and do it again. So, let's get rid of the selection by pressing command or control D to deselect. We can also come to the select menu and choose select, deselect. And you'll notice, so I'm clicking and dragging and I'm really making a way bigger selection than I need, but that's okay. We'll make it fit later, right now I just want this whole thing so I have something to work with. And then I'm gonna just press command or control C to copy, same as coming up to the edit menu and choosing copy. And then you'll notice the images that we have open, there's two ways we can access them. Up here in the tabs we can click to open multiple or to switch between different open images, but also down here there's this photo bin. So, we have this image here, and we've go this. So, we've copied this, now we'll switch over to this image and we'll paste it by choosing edit, paste or command or control V. And you'll notice that it gets pasted in right here in it's own layer. So if you're not terribly familiar with layers already, they make amazing things possible in Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements. So, we want to have things like this in it's own layer because we can then grab the move tool, which is this top tool over here on the left side of our screen in our toolbar. And now I can click and drag this into position. Now, it's obviously not quite right, so let's fine-tune it. First of all we want to be able to zoom in and see what we're doing. So I'm gonna press command or control and the plus key a couple of time. And that's just like what I call a scoot. So we're scooting in, and if I wanna scroll my image down a little bit, I'm gonna hold the space bar and that let's me click and drag and reposition the image. Alright, now wouldn't it be great if we could see through this new eye that we've transplanted into this scene, if we could see through it to the other eye, so that we could line everything up and get the new eye in the right position. So, to do that, we're gonna temporary lower the opacity of this layer, layer one in our layers panel, and that's controlled right over here. So, I'm gonna click to pop open the opacity slider, and just drag it down. It doesn't really matter, the thing is that I just want to be able to see through it. So, somewhere around fiftyish percent and then I'm gonna drag it over here, so it's getting close, but I need to rotate it. 'Cuz his head is tilted in this image and it's not so tilted in the transplant image. So, we can rotate this by invoking a special command called free transform. And we can get that by pressing command or control T, for transform. That's puts a bounding box around the contents of this layer and if I hover my cursor in the corner, I get this double-headed arrow. So, I can actually click and drag to the right. I'm trying to match the angle, so I'm looking at really his eyebrows and trying to see that they're lined up and if I click to move this into position, that's about what it would like if he suddenly opened his eyelid, it would hit right about there right now. So, I'm gonna say that's close enough, and I'll click the check mark to commit the transformation, and then let's come over here and bring the opacity back up to a 100 percent, and we see that's pretty good. But we have another problem, so although the eye is now in I think a pretty good position, we have this box going around here. So, let's do something about that. We could grab the eraser and erase it, so let me show you. This is the erasee and I would just click. I can make my eraser brush bigger if I come down here to the size slider. Make it a little bit bigger, if I want to, and I could just brush away the box, but we have a couple of not great things about this. The biggest of which if you make a mistake and maybe you don't notice it until later, you've actually erased, the contents. You can't get it back unless you undo, but that means of course that you'd have to redo. So what we're gonna do instead is really get deep for a minute and we're gonna add what's called a layer mask. So in the layer's panel, with layer one selected, remember this is the eye, the transplanted eye, we can toggle this on and off, by clicking this little eye icon right here. But with this layer selected, we're gonna click this button right here. It's a blue rectangle with a circle in the center. That's gonna add what's called, a "Layer mask". There we go. So, we click on that, we get a layer mask. Now just like a mask that you might wear at Halloween is gonna hide your face, a layer mask allows you to hide or show parts of a layer, but you get to determine what parts those are. And the way you tell Photoshop what parts to hide, or not hide, is using your paint brush and black or white paint. So, I'm gonna grab my paint brush tool that's right here, and I'm gonna switch to black paint. So right now I've got white paint on top and black paint on the bottom. These are like your active color and your on-deck color. So, I want the black color be the one I paint with, so I'm just click this little switcheroo button. It's a double-headed arrow. I call it like the switcheroo button or the macaroni noodle button, and it just flip-flops your front foreground swatch and your background swatch. So, I want black on top and then if I bring my brush back into my image, I can make my brush quite a bit bigger, and I can just paint, let's make it even a little bigger, I"m gonna just paint away gently. You'll notice it's also soft, it's got a soft edge. I'm gonna paint away the corner edges of that box. Look at that. You can see what we've done when we look over here in our layer mask. We see that I've taken black and basically painted a big black circle all around the eye that I wanna keep. So that is blocking, the black part of the mask, so it's like this layer of his eye, right here you see? This layer layer of his eye is wearing a mask, thats hiding the edges. If I go too far, like oops, I've faded his eye right there, I can back up, switch my colors, by either clicking the switcheroo or pressing X to exchange the colors, and if I make my brush a little smaller, just wanna make sure I didn't make his eye transparent or something, so I would fix that. So, if I went too far and I did something like this, I could either undo it or I could switch my colors and just paint it back. So there we have it. So we can see our work by toggling this layer on and off, and seeing that's looking pretty good. If there's any other parts we want to adjust, like there might be a part here that needs to disappear yet, I'll just make sure that that I'm on the mask, make my brush a little bigger, and there we go. So, that looks really good. And then I could go ahead and save that, and we'd be all set. So, it can be that easy to fix a blink shot.