Adjust facial features

- When you're taking a picture of people you don't always have a lot of time to set up the shot and occasionally you capture someone with a less than ideal expression on their face. Oftentimes you catch them mid smile, or potentially with no smile at all. The Elements Editor 2018 gives you the ability to adjust the facial features of people in an image. So that you can make them look their best. Now I'm beginning here in the Elements Organizer and I'm just going to do a search up here, for 'Amara'.

And that's going to present me with a couple of images here. Although I got her smiling, really well right here, this one is closer, which I like, but I caught her at an off spot here. So I'm going to select this image, go back to Grid view and click the Editor, to open that image in the Elements Editor. Now, before I do much what I think I'll do to just kind of improve on the color in this image, is I'm going to come up to Enhance, and I'm going to choose Auto Color Correction. And that will kind of warm up my image and just kind of adjust the color to make it look a little more natural.

We had a little bit of a color cast in there at first. And then, to adjust the facial features of an image, I'm going to come up here to the Enhance menu, and I'm going to choose Adjust Facial Features. Now, this is going to detect the face or faces in the image. I should point that out, that if you have more than one person in an image you'll have more than one circle. But, in this case, you can see that her face has been detected. And then over here, on the right, you can adjust all of the different properties of her face.

Including her Lips, her Eyes, her Nose and her Face as a whole. Now, I'm going to say this, less is more with this tool. What I'm going to do, just to show you, if you click on the Eyes category, you're going to notice that if I go to the Height, and I drag the slider to the right, it'll actually open up her eyes a little bit more. And I know this is subtle, but you can see, how it's making her eyes a little bit taller. You can also adjust the Width, the overall Size.

I'm not going to do this because I don't want to make her look buggy here. And if you want to do this as a joke or you're just playing around, go at it. You can adjust this as much as you want. But what I want to do here is just give her a little bit of smile. I am going to go ahead and increase the height of her eyes a little bit just so that her eyes are open a little bit more. And then I'm going to go to her Lips category, and you'll notice that we have the Smile overall as well as the Height, the Width and then you can adjust the Upper and Lower Lip independently.

So, in the Smile slider, I'm just going to drag this to the right a little bit. And again, less is more, If I go all the way over, that's looking a little fake. So all I want her to do is be smiling a little bit and that really does not look too bad. If you wanted to you can then tweak the Upper and Lower Lip, to just get it to be a little bit fuller. And adjust this accordingly. And you can now click on the Before to see the before instance and the After to see after.

If I go ahead and click the Okay button, it's going to process that image, and now the adjustment has been made to this file. So I'll say this again, less is definitely more. You want to be really careful with this tool but it is very powerful. Used carefully, you can adjust the facial features of the subjects in your images to make them look their best.