Retouching Eyes part 1

One of the most important elements in a portrait is the person’s eyes. They are the element which draws our attention and which, if properly shot, can change entirely the picture. The following tutorial will teach you how to use the tools available in Adobe Photoshop to edit a person’s eyes in a portrait. You will learn to add color intensity to them, some highlights and make them look sharper. The resulting image will have a more fashion picture aspect and will make your model look more glamorous.

Step 1

Start up Photoshop and open the picture you want to edit. Go to the File menu at the top of the main window and select “Open”, from the list. Browse through the folders on your hard drive until you found the photo you want to edit. In order to learn these steps better, is it recommended to use for the first time a picture representing the person’s face, so that any modifications you perform at the eyes level will be easily noticeable.

Step 2

Editing the person’s eyes should be the final manipulation you perform on your image. Make sure you have finished doing all the other modifications (crop, contrast and brightness adjustment, tone correction and others) before following the steps presented in this tutorial.

Step 3

You have opened the image. If you look at the Layers palette, you will see that you have one layer, which contains the actual image, the “Background” layer. You need now to create a new blank layer. Use the Ctrl+Shift+N key combination to open the “New Layer” dialog box.

Step 4

The new layer will hold the shadows, so that simply rename it “shadows”. Click the “OK” button and Photoshop will add the “shadows” layer above the Background layer.

Step 5

You now need to select both eyes in the same time. For this, use the “Lasso” tool which you will find in the Tools palette (or you can select it by pressing the L key).

Step 6

Using the “Lasso” tool, draw a selection around one of the eyes. Hold down “Shift” to add to the initial selection and then select the other eye in the same manner (keep pressing the Shift key to instruct Photoshop not to throw away the first selection while selecting the second eye)



Step 7

Now you will add some shadows to the top of the eyes. Select the “shadow” layer in the Layers palette. Grab the “Brush tool” from the Tools palette (or you can use its keyboard shortcut by pressing B)

Step 8

Select a large enough, soft-edged brush. Its size can be around 40 or 50 pixels (it will vary from case to case, depending on your image’s size). Use the selected brush to paint along the top edge of both eyes in order to add a shadow.

Step 9

Now that you have painted the shadows, you should change the blend mode of the “shadow” layer from Normal to Multiply. You should also lower the layer’s opacity to around 40%.

Step 10

You can deselect both eyes now. Do this by pressing the Ctrl+D key combination to have them deselected.

Continue to Part 2

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