How to Fix Glasses Glare in Photoshop

In our 13 tips to photograph people with glasses, most tips are things you need to do at the photo session to avoid or deal with light. 

Sometimes you just cannot avoid the glare, especially when using flash photography or in bright sunlight.  If this is the case, a little preparation and a little photoshop can go a long way.

Step 1: Preparation.

Take photos of your subject with their glasses on.  And then at as similar position as you can with their glasses off.  It will help if you have a tripod — and a remote trigger can help too.  Optimally, if you have a helper or an assistant who can ease the glasses off of the customer while you are at your camera ready to shoot, you will get the best possible results.

It is important for you to get the images as close to the same positioning and even more crucial that your white balance, exposure and lighting match. I recommend doing this prior to any editing with our Photoshop actions or Lightroom presets.

Here is the first shot – glasses with glare:

Here is the second shot – no glasses:

Step 2: Combine in Photoshop (AKA – this is where the magic happens)

Open both images in Photoshop (Elements should work fine too).  Take the lasso tool and select the general eye area of the “no glasses image” – for best results use a light feather of 10-20% depending on the image’s resolution.

Next, you need to get this selection to the other image.  There are a dozen or so ways to do this.  But, one easy way is to drag it over using the move tool.  Another way is to go to EDIT – COPY, then switch to the photo where the glasses show glare and go to EDIT – PASTE.

It now will look like this (or similar to this – depending how close your photos lined up to begin with…)

Using the MOVE tool (shortcut is tapping “V” on your keyboard), move the eyes over the eyes inside the glasses.  If needed, lower the opacity of this layer so that you can see how to best line them up.  If the angle on the head varies, click CTRL +T (PC) or Command + T (Mac) to rotate them to the exact angle and size as well.

Once lined up, go to LAYER – LAYER MASK – HIDE ALL. This will add a black mask to hide the new eyes. Take a white brush at 100% opacity with a very soft edge and start painting the eyes in.  You may want to zoom in for this step.

Below you can see I am zoomed in to a pixel level in order to paint the eyes without glare back in.  This was 2/3 the way through. Still a few more spots to clean up.

Step 3: Congratulate yourself.

If you need to enhance the eyes further, smooth skin, etc, check our out retouching Photoshop actions. Now that you have swapped eyes, we recommend you save a PSD of this file, then flatten and continue editing your image as you desire.

This photo was shared with us courtesy of Lori Day, one of our amazing admins of our Facebook Group.  If you are looking to get the most of your MCP Products, consider joining.