Can anyone point me at a good tutorial or give advice for getting rid of the dreaded 9-o-clock shadow in photos of me? I have some great pics that I would like to share with folks, but they are ruined as my shadow is showing.
I am competent with photoshop, but I don't know what is the best method for touching up selfies to remove the shadow without making it look doctored.
Any ideas please?
Selfies are usually harder to adjust. A good close-up with a tripod instead of the arm stretch or the mirror is better. Any camera with RAW or tiff output is a lot better than the jpeg that comes out of the smartphones. The jpg artifacts plus a small number of pixels image may hamper your ability to adjust properly. The more pixels in the area of adjustment, the better.
Before doing any area or spot mods to the image, adjust the color temperature of the photo by decreasing the blue and green sliders in Levels or use Curves. Too cold (bluish or greenish) image may hamper this mod.
Usually a lasso tool along the faceline in the 5 o'clock shadow area with a feather of 2-4 pixels for starters, you may have to come back to increase the feather range later. In Layer, new layer via copy. Then go to Hue and Saturation tool and select Blue instead of Master. Usually the shadow shows blue. Decrease the blue slider a bit and increase the lighten slider a bit. Try the hue slider to to change the blue component to an orangeish hue to match the rest of the face. Experiment with the sliders. You may have to go to the Levels if you have Photoshop Elements or use Curves in CS. If you are satisfied, merge the layers, otherwise, delete the layer and try again with the lasso tool. I haven't done that but I have experience with Photoshop plus I had a darkroom since 1968.
Joelene
As a person who does image editing professionally, I can saw it's extremely difficult to remove 5 o'clock shadows.
You basically have to zoom in very closely and paint it out in very small points using the color of the nearby skin. The skin color changes quite a lot too. It's probably one of the hardest things to do!
And I've had to do it on some of my own photos. Lol
And Joelene has good tips too.
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Get Picasa 3 and use the retouch brush