Tips to paint out eyebrows?

evilded777

I'm kind of crappy in Photoshop.  Anyone got good tips for painting out eyebrows? I prefer the latest breeds of external brows, but I got to get rid of the painted on ones.

 

Any tips or tricks or tutorials appreciated.

Knittingmommy

I like using the clone tool for this.  Use the tool to grab a part of the skin on the face that doesn't have the eyebrow and 'copy' it to the brush.  I use GIMP so I'm not sure if it works the same or not.  But, you can adjust the size of the brush to whatever size you need.  I would make just slightly larger than the widest part of the eyebrow.  Then, paste over the eyebrow with the skin you copied to the brush until all of the eyebrow is gone.  Then, use the Healing brush.  In Gimp, this is the one that looks like band-aids.  I'm not sure what it looks like in PS.  With the healing brush, put the brush over the best part you have where the two section (the untouched skin and the painted over part) overlap and copy that to the Healing brush.  With that brush set, go around the edges until you get it all evened out and it looks nice.  It might take a couple of tries and some practice, but I think you can do it.  It's fairly easy for me and I'm still just learning all of the postwork stuff.  If you need more help, drop by my thread in the Art Studio and let me know.  I'll try to put up a step by step with screen shots for you in there.

Tottallou

I don't know of any tutorial but I use the Spot Healing Brush Tool on the brows to do this

If there are artifacts you can just use the spot healing brush again or use the clone stamp

 

 

Cris Palomino

If you're using PS that has Content Aware fill, then you can select the brow area and try filling with Content Aware selected.  In many cases, this may be all you need.  In others, it will do pretty well and then you can clean it up with tools such as Tottallou suggested.

evilded777

Cris Palomino said:

If you're using PS that has Content Aware fill, then you can select the brow area and try filling with Content Aware selected.  In many cases, this may be all you need.  In others, it will do pretty well and then you can clean it up with tools such as Tottallou suggested.

I probably do... I have a current subscription, but I am unaware of this function. Where might I find it?

 

Lindsey

Use the Lasso tool and select a brow, the right click over lasso'ed brow and select Fill.  On the Fill screen, the with Use: = Content Aware, leave the Blending box defaults at  Mode: Normal, 100%..   Click OK

Edit: I'm using Photoshop CS6. 

Photoshop CC has additional Content Aware fill features.  https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/fix-photo-content-aware.html

evilded777

I found the Content Aware stuff, was pretty neat but in this case gave me too much eyelid.

 

Thanks for all the tips, folks, I am doing much better! Gotta keep at it.

gederix

My 2¢: I find the patch tool works best for removing eyebrows, just select the tool, draw a selection around maybe half of one brow (I do half at a time but you could do the whole brow in one shot, the brows I was removing were bushier toward the nose so made sense to me at the time) then drag that selection up until you find a nice section of skin to fill the area and release, the tool automatically adjusts the patch to blend, its really a one click pony compared to the healing or clone tools, but you can then use the clone stamp to fix any small discrepancies. For me there were none, just select and drag, done, looked better than anything I could have cloned (cloning is a great tool but very hard to use subtly and not mess up the fine dedtail of the textures you are working with, blurring and smudging them with the edge of the brush for ex.

pds

gederix said:

My 2¢: I find the patch tool works best for removing eyebrows, just select the tool, draw a selection around maybe half of one brow (I do half at a time but you could do the whole brow in one shot, the brows I was removing were bushier toward the nose so made sense to me at the time) then drag that selection up until you find a nice section of skin to fill the area and release, the tool automatically adjusts the patch to blend, its really a one click pony compared to the healing or clone tools, but you can then use the clone stamp to fix any small discrepancies. For me there were none, just select and drag, done, looked better than anything I could have cloned (cloning is a great tool but very hard to use subtly and not mess up the fine dedtail of the textures you are working with, blurring and smudging them with the edge of the brush for ex.

For skin detail, when using the Clone Stamp tool in PS, it's best to use a small hard brush to avoid smudging the edges. Resampling can help avoid "tool marks" (obvious repeating clone patterns). Two important considerations when it comes to effective skin retouching are: (1) realizing that skin texture varies based on the location on the body (e.g. the texture under the eye is quite different than the skin texture on other parts of the face), and (2) skin texture has "direction", so it is important to follow that direction when cloning; otherwise, even if you have a good match, the cloned portion may not blend seamlessly.

Any color/tone discrepancies between a cloned/healed/patched portion of skin and its surrounding skin texture can be finessed using a combination of adjustment layers with masks. The ones I typically use are Hue/Sat and Curves (sometimes channel-specific curves) to address color, saturation, and brightness mismatches.

Most of this won't matter too much for pull-back images, but for facial closeups, it's important.

gederix

All true but the OP already admitted to minimal Shop skillz so my tip on the patch tool was intended for someone like him. Clone, content aware fills, healing brushes, not to mention adjustment layers with masks, all have issues that can cause more problems as others are fixed, pretty much require knowing what you are doing, the patch tool on the other hand can give quite good to excellent results with minimal fuss and minimal skillz.

nonesuch00

I will try these suggestions too, LOL, until such time, if ever, that I make a complete texture myself, which given my struggle with Gimp's clone tool yesterday, mmmm. It's really only eyebrows and a few other places that need alterations anyway.

pds

gederix said:

All true but the OP already admitted to minimal Shop skillz so my tip on the patch tool was intended for someone like him. Clone, content aware fills, healing brushes, not to mention adjustment layers with masks, all have issues that can cause more problems as others are fixed, pretty much require knowing what you are doing, the patch tool on the other hand can give quite good to excellent results with minimal fuss and minimal skillz.

Yep, and sorry if I made it seem like I was trying to be contrary to your advice. I appreciated that the OP was seeking as simple a solution as possible; my comments were meant to be helpful to anyone coming across this thread who may be more comfortable in PS.