Photographing people with glasses...

Over the weekend I was photographing my girls for a canvas pano they are giving to their mom for Mothers Day.

One of the problems I faced (other than the fact when I talk they hear "blah, blah, blah") is two of my three girls wear glasses. To make it even harder Emma (pictured above) has eye glasses with very wide sides (that work great at blocking light) AND she wears them further away from her eyes because she has incredibly long eye lashes.


So I took a few shots and was not at all liking the results so I decided to try something I had been shown by Jed Taufer, I instructed Emma to try to maintain her position as best she could while reaching up and removing her eye glasses and snapped a couple shots of her with her glasses off (this will work best if you shoot on a tripod).


I took all the images into Photoshop and using a lasso tool made a rough selection around her eyes (in the image without glasses).


I copied the selection and then pasted it into the image with the glasses. I lowered the opacity of the eyes I brought into the image and this helped me get them into the correct position. Make sure you increase it back to 100% before moving on. With the layer of the imported eyes selected I created a "hide all" (black) layer mask by holding down the "ALT" key and then clicking on the layer mask button.


Then using a white brush I carefully erase the lenses in her glasses revealing her eyes that I brought over and "hid" in the layer mask. If you make a mistake while erasing and remove part of the frames simply change the brush to black and paint over the area you meant to keep and it will "re-appear".

Here is another look at the finished product.


And that was pretty much it. If folks find these instructions hard to follow I might be talked into doing a "how to" video on this.

Click on any of the images to view larger and in a new window.