Eye Brighten/Color

Today will be about making the eyes pop, while not over-powering the photo.

I’m starting with an old, pre-edited photo of my cousin’s child.

This was another one from before I had Photoshop and when I had a bad monitor.

It didn’t turn out quite how I’d wanted it to so I’m going to fix it up.

To start making the eyes less dull, I’m going to use the Dodge Tool.

It’s in the Toolbar and looks like a black magnifying glass.

The Dodge tool lightens parts of photos, and alternatively the Burn tool darkens.

Here it’s made the shine more white, and the eyes brighter.

In film photography it was much trickier since the photographer/developer would have to find a way to expose only the part they wanted to brighten for longer.

On top of having to manipulate the light for exposure it would sometimes become a guessing game of how long to expose it to brighten it because if it was too long, it would look odd since the rest of the photograph would be much darker.

_{Now that today’s photo-history lesson is over…}

When I had originally edited this, I didn’t have a way to remove the pasta stain from her skin.

Now I’m going to get rid of it using the Patch Tool.

I’m also going to increase the contrast now.

The old version looks dull because my monitor made it look like the contrast was fine.

The skin under her lip still looks a little patchy from the pasta.

To fix this, I’m going to use the Surface Blur technique I used in a post 2 weeks ago.

Children tend to naturally have nice skin, so this is purely to even out the skin tone.

Now I’m going to go ahead and put a Curve on this.

I used Julia Trotti’s “Lullabye” for this one.

It gives it whimsical purple and pink tones that also match her dress.

Now like in my Selective Coloring post, I’m going to use the Hue/Saturation Adjustment to change her eye color slightly.

I’m going to use the Layer Mask that is made when creating a Hue/Saturation layer.

I have it high-lighted here so everyone can see where the Layer Mask is.

Make sure you have the Mask selected to add or subtract from it.

Now the Paintbrush can be used to add or subtract from the selection.

White adds. Black subtracts.

I’m going to select just the eyes.

This means I can change just the blue of her eyes without effecting surrounding colors by selecting Blue and Cyan from the drop down and changing them by playing with the Hue slider.

Here I mostly just lightened them and gave them a slight teal tint.

This works best for changing blue eyes since they contrast so well against skin, but can be done to other eye colors as well as long as you get a good selection.

Here’s another, more apparent example using this on my own eyes.

That’s all for this week.

Here’s a little She & Him for listening to while editing.

Have a _______ Thanksgiving.

_{(I don’t want to tell you what kind of Thanksgiving to have.)}