If there’s a face in a picture then that’s where the viewer first looks, and at the eyes in particular. It’s the eyes we focus the camera on, and try to make the most of when taking the shot by throwing in a bit of light from a speedlite or reflector, or at the very least, using the catch-light reflector to give the eyes some sparkle. But, we can further enhance the eyes after the picture is taken by using a computer program like Photoshop.
Our model for today will be Scamp. Were you expecting a person?
OK, we have loaded our picture into Photoshop, so the first thing we need to do is select the eyes and copy them to a new layer. With a small area like this the Quickmask tool (q) is good as any. We don’t need to be too accurate at this stage. You’ll need to be viewing actual pixel size about now, so do that with (Ctrl Alt 0) The last round thing is a zero.
Time Out — For some reason Adobe made the default setting for the Quickmask tool so that we need to paint out the background to the object we want to select. This feels just plain wrong to me – I prefer to paint in the object I want to select. It’s easily fixed though. Double click the Quickmask icon at the bottom of the Tools pallet, and set the option to ‘Selected areas’.
Right, we’ve roughly painted in the eyes with a black brush using Quickmask, so we need to toggle it off again (q) to view the selected area – unless you ignored the advice about changing the Quickmask options, in which case you need to invert the selection (Shift Ctrl i). Now either use (Ctrl j) to copy the selection to a new layer, or head up to the menu bar and go Layer > New > Layer via copy. You might want to take a taxi because it’s a long round trip.
Time Out — The reason we select the eyes before copying the layer, is that it drastically reduces the increase in the image file. Try it both ways, while watching the file size in the bottom left corner of the Photoshop window. File size has a direct impact on performance.
Now for some magic. Make sure the eyes layer is selected, and change its blend mode to Screen. Screen is the most effective blend mode when you want to brighten pixels, and you’ll probably need to tone it down by reducing the layer opacity, but before you do that, this is a good time to fine tune eyes selection by adding a layer mask, (it’s easier to see what you are doing with the eyes fully bright). I generally start by masking everything out, which you achieve by either clicking on the layer mask icon and inverting it (Ctrl i), or using the Alt key while clicking on the layer mask icon.
Now use a small, soft, white brush, and carefully paint the eyes back in. You need to make sure the mask is selected, (it will have a double outline). The trick with all things Photoshop is to maintain realistic shadows, so use the feathered edge of your brush at the edges to leave a soft shadow next to the lids. It’s obvious when you think about it. Now is a good time to reduce the layer opacity unless you want your subject to look like a crazy person.
Note: If you want to be clever, ignore the last sentence, because it’s only the whites of the eyes that tend to be over bright, so an alternative would be to change the brush colour to black (x), reduce its opacity to about 50%, and carefully paint over the whites with the layer mask selected. This leaves the pupils fully bright, but brings the irises back under control. Every image is different, so you’ll need to make your own judgment call here.
There’s much more we can to do, but I am going to leave that to the next part in this series.
