Transcript:
In this video, we’re gonna see how to manually open closed eyes with Photoshop Elements well. See how to go from this to this? Hi, this is Rick From essential Photoshop Elements. Comm, Let’s go over to elements and get started. I’m using Photoshop Elements 15 for this video, But you can use older versions as well. I have this photo of Linda with her eyes closed. And, as I explained in the last video, the photo was staged. Just so I could show you how to do this technique. I also have this other staged photo where we both have our eyes open, so we’re gonna take. Linda’s open eyes from this photo and use them in the other photo. The first thing I’m gonna do is make a selection of her open eyes to do that. I’m going to go over to the tool box and click on the lasso tool to make it the active tool now with the lasso tool, I’m going to go over to the active image area and click and drag around both eyes to select them. And I’m gonna include the eyebrows, Even though we might not need them in case we do, we’ll have them next. I’m going to copy the selected area by pressing Command C on a Mac or it would be Ctrl C on a PC, and now I’ll deselect by pressing command or Ctrl D. Now let’s go back to our other photo by clicking on its tab at the top of the window, and I’m gonna paste those eyes into this photo by pressing command V on a Mac or it would be Ctrl V on a PC, and it pastes those eyes right in the center of our photo. Let’s take a look over in the layer’s panel because I want you to see that it pasted the eyes onto a new layer and it’s named layer 1 by default. That’s great that the eyes are on their own layer because now I can make changes to them without affecting my original photo, which is the background layer. Now this layer stuff all kind of happened automatically. I didn’t have to tell elements to put the eyes on their own layer. Whenever you do. A standard pasted into a photo in Photoshop Elements, it automatically pastes it onto a new layer. You can also change that default name of layer 1 that elements gives the new layer, for example, if we wanted to give our layer a more descriptive name, you can just double-click on the name in the layer’s panel, and it highlights the name so now. I can just type whatever name I want for that layer. I’m gonna type eyes, then press. Enter or return on your keyboard to complete the name change. Now let’s move the eyes into place to do that. I’m going to go back over to the tool box and click on the move tool to make it the active tool. It’s the first tool in the Select section of the tool box and it looks like a cross with four arrowheads now. I’ll move my cursor back to the work area and click and drag those open eyes over the closed eyes. Sometimes it helps to align to the new photo by lowering the opacity of the eyes layer so that you can see the layer below. Let’s lower the opacity to about 50% you can do that by placing your cursor right on the word opacity at the top of the layer’s panel and then click and drag to the left and we’ll go until we get to about 50% and then release the mouse button. Let’s zoom in a little closer to do that. You can hold down the command, spacebar on a Mac or it would be control space by on a PC and let me move my cursor over here when you do that, your cursor temporarily changes into the zoom tool so while holding those two keys down. I’m gonna click once right between the eyes. Try to ignore that dashingly handsome fellow over on the right by default. The move tool has a bounding box around it. If you don’t see the bounding box, you can go down to the tool options and click on the box labeled show bounding box, so mine is showing, but if it’s not and just click on this box here, and then you get the bounding box. So now because we lowered the opacity, we can see the open eyes that we brought in from the other photo, and we can also see the closed eyes, The easiest part to see from the closed eyes layer are the eyelashes, just because they’re so dark, so let’s focus on the open and closed eyes on the left. Let me just show you what? I’m talking about. I’ll get my brush tool and we’re just going to look at the open and closed eyes over on this side for now notice how close the open eye is to the lashes of the closed eye and how they’re at about the same angle. See how the open eye? I’ll draw a line along the bottom of it, and I’ll draw a line along the the bottom of the eyelashes, and they’re pretty parallel lines. Now compare that to the open eyes and the lashes on the right over here, looking at these two If I draw a line following the bottom of the open eye, it’s there, and if I draw one along the bottom of the lashes, it goes down like that, so there’s quite a difference between the eyes on the left and the eyes on the right. The reason for that is probably that Linda tilted her head slightly between these two shots and we can use the. Move tool to rotate the layer of the open eyes to match the closed eyes a little better. This is why. I wanted you to turn on the show bounding box option for the move tool. So I’m gonna turn off my markups here. We’ll go back to the eyes layer and get the move tool and we have our bounding box, and if you place your cursor close to the outside of any of the four corners of the bounding box, it turns into this double headed, curved arrow, and that indicates that you can click and drag with your mouse to rotate that layer so. I’ll do that now and I’ll just try to get the angles on each side to match to the lashes of the other layer, and I think that looks I’m gonna release the mouse button and then I’ll click the green checkmark to accept that change. Now we don’t need to resize the eyes in this example, but I just want to mention to you that if you get your eyes from a photo, that’s not as similar as my two photos are. You might need to resize the open eyes to match the closed eyes photo, and you can also use the. Move tools, bounding box to do that. You can click and drag on any of these eight little squares. They’re called handles to make the eyes larger or smaller. So if I place it over this corner handle and drag in, you can see the open eyes get much smaller or I can drag them out to make them larger since I don’t want that change. I’m going to click on the red, no symbol to undo it, but I just wanted to show you how that worked now that we have the eyes lined up. We can change the opacity back to 100% for our eyes layer again, just click and drag right on the word opacity to change it. I find them move tools, bounding box distracting, so I’m gonna hide it by clicking on the show bounding box option down in the tool options to uncheck it. I think the eyes look good, but we have some mismatched areas in the hair just to the left of the eyes over in the layer’s panel. I’m gonna click on this little eyeball icon. That’s next to our eyes layer to show and hide the visibility of that layer when I click on it. It gets a red line through it, indicating that the visibility of that layer is hidden over in our live work area. In other words, we can no longer see the open eyes. We only see our original background layer, and if I click on that icon again, the red line goes away and we see the open eyes over in our image again in the active image area, so you can click that off and on to see the before and after and when I do that, we can more easily Identify the mismatched parts of her hair in this example. I want to get rid of the hair that I brought over with the open eyes Now. Normally I would use a layer mask to hide that hair on the eyes layer, but to keep it simple for folks that might not know understand how to use layer masks. I’m just going to use the eraser tool to erase it first. I’ll click on the eraser tool in the tool box to make it the active tool next. I’ll use the left and right bracket keys on my keyboard to resize the eraser Every time I press the right bracket key. My cursor gets larger and every time. I pressed the left bracket key. It gets smaller, so Ill. Make it about that big. Make sure that you have your eyes layer active. The active layer is highlighted in blue, so if it’s not active, just click on it to make it active. Now you can just click and drag over the areas that don’t look right to erase them you and I’ll click on the eye icon again for the eyes layer to see the before, and after there’s still a little problem with the hair I noticed, so I’ll erase that. Let’s look again and a little bit more here. Now, let’s see how it looks probably take a little more off here, and I think I’m gonna leave it at that. So let’s see our before and after Yeah, so once. It looks good to you, you’re done. I already mentioned that the source photo for your open eyes might be quite different from your photo of the closed eyes and that you might have to use the. Move tool, bounding box to resize the eyes. Another option to use if the two photos are very different from each other is to select each eye individually rather than both at once. Then you can copy and paste each eye onto its own layer so that you can manipulate the size and/or rotation of each eye by itself without affecting the other eye and that wraps up this tutorial on how to manually open closed eyes with Photoshop elements. Until next time this is Rick from essential Photoshop elements, comm saying, take care.