Fixing closed eyes without
losing the face

What usually goes wrong

Most eye-opening tools hand the whole photo to a model and take back whatever it returns. The eyes open. So does everything else move a little: the skin loses its grain, a mole disappears, the jaw narrows by a few pixels, the shadow under the nose lands somewhere new. Nothing is obviously broken, which is the problem — the picture just stops being of that person, and it is hard to say why.

Reviews of the cheap eye-openers on the App Store say this in their own words: the eyes come back looking pasted on, or the face comes back looking like a sibling.

What actually has to happen

1. The edit has to be fenced in. Only the eye region goes to the model. The rest of the frame never leaves the original file.
2. The crop has to carry context. Sent alone, an eye socket comes back lit from a direction that does not match the face. The surrounding area goes with it so the light stays where the camera put it.
3. The result has to be checked, not trusted. The pixels outside the mark are compared with the source. If something drifted out there, the result is wrong, whatever the eyes look like.

How Reposy does it

You open the photo, tap the face, and the phone proposes the eye area on its own — on the device, in a few tens of milliseconds, sending nothing anywhere. If it guesses badly, the brush is right there. Then you pick a card: open eyes, or look at the camera. There is no text box to get wrong.

Where it will not help

• Eyes closed hard, in profile. A blink caught side-on has almost nothing of the eye left in the frame to work from.
• Very small faces in a group shot. A face forty pixels wide has no eye to open, only a suggestion of one.
• Motion blur across the eye. Sharpness the camera never recorded is an invention, and inventing is what this app is built not to do.

These are limits of the photograph, not of the app, and no tool honestly gets past them.