EYES
I will begin a series of tutorials / links regarding some photoshop retouching techniques. It will be called “The Importance Of.” Each post will identify one portion of retouching an image and focus on that. This is meant to be a learning experience, not only for me but for the reader as well. If you have any suggestions or comments please be sure to leave them in the comment section. With that said, here we go:
In almost every picture, the eye’s are the main focal point of the image. Adjusting, sharpening and coloring the eyes can make all the difference in the world. Here are a few examples that I consider to be very good; courtesy of RJSTILLS.
As you can see, the eyes really drive these photographs. In most of them, they are the first thing you notice when looking at the image. There are countless ways to adjust the look of the eyes in Photoshop. Here are just a few of the ways I achieve a quality look in the eyes.
Here is the image I will be using, this method can be used on virtually any picture.
First things first, I am going to Duplicate my image so I don’t lose my original in case I ever need to revert back to that image. I can do this by dragging the background layer onto the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette or by just hitting CMD + J (CTRL + J ).
The first method I will be using the original color of the eyes, I will select the lasso tool (L)
and make a quick selection around the the pupils of the eyes. I also added a 1 pixel feather to the selection.
This may vary depending on your image, but for this example, 1 pixel will be just fine. Make sure you hold down the Shift key to when selecting both eyes at the same time, we want to make sure both eyes are adjusting equally.
Your selection should look like this:
Now go to Filter >> Sharpen >> Unsharp Mask and play around with the settings inside of the Unsharp Mask Dialog Box. Here are the values that I set for my specific picture, I like the eyes to be very exaggerated so don’t be afraid to go overboard to start off with.
These settings will vary depending on the edges and I couldn’t even begin to explain the meaning of each of these controls. For a more in-depth explanation on these controls please visit this site.
As you can see, we have really added some great depth, color and sharpening to the eye. This easy step already makes a huge difference in our image.
Do not deselect the eyes just yet, we still need to keep that selection to keep making adjustments. This looks good now, but lets add an extra punch to the eyes by creating a Vibrance Adjustment Layer. To make a non-destructive adjustment layer click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon on the bottom of the layer panel.
After you choose this, and if your selection is still around the eyes you will notice it automatically creates a new layer on top of the original layer WITH a mask around the eyes. Your selection will disappear, but adjusting these sliders will ONLY effect the selection of the eyes. Play around with these sliders as well, bumping up the vibrance and saturation will give this picture a very dramatic result. Since the eyes were relatively dark to begin with, I had to move these sliders up quite a bit to achieve a result I was happy with. Here are the settings I chose:
Please take note to the red circle. This little icon is VERY handy when making adjustment layers, you can click on this icon to see how the image looks WITHOUT the adjustment applied. Instead of toggling your layer on / off to see the results, you can just click this little guy to catch a peek.
Here are the results we’ve gotten so far, the image on the left is the BEFORE and the image on the right is AFTER the Unsharp Mask and Vibrance Adjustment Layer.
So this is already looking SO much better than before right? We can easily call this image good. We have some nice color of the pupils, and some great highlights (catch lights) in the eye as well. But if you’re not satisfied with the result thus far, or want to do some more tweaking (like I do) then we can do some dodging and burning to really finalize this image.
Make sure you are saving often, if you haven’t already, now would be a good time!
Since using the dodge / burn tool is considered destructive editing (you are effecting the actual layer) there are a couple of ways to work around this.
1) Merge all layers down to create a new original layer, duplicate the merged layer and work on the new one. If you don’t like the result, then you can just delete the duplicated layer and start over.
2) Using a 50% gray overlay layer using white / black colored brushes. I won’t go into detail on that, but you can find that information here in case you’re interested.
3) Use the history brush tool.
I will be using the history brush tool in this particular case. In the History palette I will choose a spot in my History that I would like photoshop to “remember” in case I decide I want to go back to that point in my editing. I know it’s fairly confusing as first, but basically I’m choosing a snapshot of my work (and in this case it is after my vibrance adjustment layer), and photoshop will “remember” this snapshot. If I then select my history brush tool, I’ll be able to “paint” back in that original image regardless of the editing I make from here on out. I’m terrible at explaining this, so click here if you still need some clarification, which I most likely assume you will. : ) I’m basically just using the history brush tool as a precaution, in case I mess up. Here is the spot I chose:
The right eye seems to be a little bit brighter than the left so I will use my Burn Tool set to highlights to darken the pupils just a little bit in order to get a better match to the left eye.
I am using a soft round brush with an exposure of about 50%. Just a couple of clicks around the pupil of the eye will be plenty.
Pretty easy fix huh?
Now I am going to use the Dodge Tool to Lighten the whites of the eyes. I could also use this method on the catchlights (or highlights on the pupil) too if I wanted, but they are already bright enough for me. Here are my settings:
I took a small 8 pt. round soft brush and clicked a few times around the white areas of the eye, until they brightened up just a bit. Be careful not to overdo this edit, because if you lighten them too much, the subject will look plain scary!
Here you will have to use some of your own discretion regarding the range & shadows. I used this on the whites of the eyes around the pupil. On this particular image, there wasn’t much white around the eyes, so I found that dodging (lightening) the shadows worked fairly well for me. I set this at a low exposure so that I could click multiple times and really build up that lightening until I was satisfied as opposed to having a high exposure and clicking once to get a result that was displeasing.
This is just one of MANY ways to adjust the eyes of the image. Another possible way to adjust the eyes is to paint the iris’ on a separate layer, blur the layer and then set the blending mode to soft light and adjust from there. That can give some very nice, subtle results.
Here is our final result, as you can see it really enhances the image!
Here are just a few links to some other tutorials on how to adjust / enhance the eyes in a photograph. Thanks for reading!
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The “5 Second Eye Enhancement” from PlanetPhotoshop
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