Hi folks.
Glyn here, back with another video for you, and this time, I've got a really quick Photoshop
technique that has just three steps to give your portraits amazing eyes.
All right.
Now, there's lots of techniques that we can use with Photoshop Lightroom and Camera Raw
for making eyes really, really stand out.
Really, the idea behind this video is to just give you another technique, a really quick
technique that you can put into your Photoshop toolbox that you can use for really making
those eyes in portrait shots really, really stand out and have impact.
Now, the picture you can see on screen now is actually finished.
Here we can see the eyes are really, really starting to stand out.
They're sharp.
There's lots of contrast and detail in there.
I want to show you that technique now, just with three very, very simple steps, and it's
one that I use quite a lot.
Let's just dive over to Photoshop and here we can see the out of camera picture where
absolutely nothing has been done to it.
The eyes are as they were, so let's just quickly run through those three steps.
Now before we do that, let's just zoom in so that the eyes are nice and big.
That'll do just fine.
Step one then.
What we need to do is make a selection of the eyes.
I'm going to do that using something like my elliptical marquee tool, hold down my shift
key and I'll drag out a selection of the eye on the left-hand side of the screen.
You'll notice I'm not going right to the outside.
I'm actually staying within the area where we can see this kind of black outline.
We want to keep that there because that's going to really help as well to make the eyes
stand out.
There's one selection.
Let's hold down the shift key and drag out our selection on the other eye as well, again
keeping that dark outline just on the outside of our selection, like so.
Now that we've got our two selections in place, I'm going to go to Quick Mask mode by pressing
Q on my keyboard and that's going to show me with this red overlay what's actually going
to be selected and also affected by the steps we're going to go through in a moment.
Now, clearly, there's more selected here than I want.
We certainly don't want to include the eyebrows and the eyelids.
While I'm in Quick Mask mode, I can just get a simple round medium softish brush, paint
with a white foreground color and remove this red overlay off the areas
that I don't want it to be, so certainly off the eyebrows and the eyelids.
The same with the other eye on the other side there.
Actually, we don't want to affect the pupils.
They're just black so we're going to get rid of those as well.
We don't need to select those.
We're not going to be affecting those with the next following steps.
That's that there.
Now if we just zoom in a little bit, we can see where we have this Quick Mask overlay,
we can see the outline of it or the outside of it is very, very sharp and very defined.
Now, if I just left that like that, it would mean that the selection was also going to
be very, very sharp and very defined.
When I then start to work on the eyes, it will look obvious that I've done something
because it won't naturally blend in, so we need to feather this down.
Now, this is a great way of doing feathering visually.
Rather than trying to guess how much feathering we have to do, if we use Quick Mask and then
come into Filter, Blur and Gaussian Blur, we can then dial in how much pixel radius
we need to add in, and we can see in real time how much it's going to soften down or
feather our selection.
Now I'm just going to dial in something nice and low here, about two pixel radius.
If I turn that preview on and off, on and off, you can see there it's just softening
it down nicely.
That will really help things to look much more realistic when we come to do the next
few steps.
We'll click okay.
Let's just zoom out a little bit now so we can see both of those eyes, like so, and we'll
press Q to come out of Quick Mask mode.
Now, we've got the eyes selected.
That's step one done.
Now, step two, we're going to come over to the adjustments on the right-hand side here
and we're going to choose a selective color adjustment layer.
We'll click on that.
Nothing seems to happen just yet, but now that we have this selective color adjustment
layer, we're going to come to the blend modes and change it from Normal to Linear Dodge
Add.
Now, keep an eye on the eyes when I do that.
We go from Normal to Linear Dodge now.
Look how much, straight away, the impact that gives on the eyes.
Clearly, it's way too much, but we can see, it's really, really brightened them up.
The best way to get the right amount of brightness on this is very difficult to judge it when
they're this close.
If you just double-click on the hand tool to go to Full Screen View, clearly there you
can see it's too much.
We can now use the opacity and get a realistic idea of what it will look like.
It's very, very difficult to judge when they're right up close.
Now, just for the sake of this video, I'm going to keep it fairly high.
I'm going to go to around about forty-five on the opacity, on that selective color adjustment
layer there, so yeah, that's about right.
Now let's zoom in.
Now the great thing about this selective color adjustment layer is, first of all, we've used
it to brighten the eyes but now in the actual properties of the selective color, we can
start to affect the color.
Now, it might be that by default when you first use this, your colors will be set to
red.
Now, if we go to the drop-down menu and choose Neutrals, now we can use these sliders to
affect the color.
Let's just make the eyes have a little bit more blue in them, so let's just play around
with the sliders here, bring that over.
We'll increase some of the blue as well, like so.
We can see we've got a little bit of color there.
Now, I want to add a little bit of contrast into the eyes as well and I can do that.
Come back up to the color drop-down menu and rather having neutrals, go to blacks.
Then we can use the black slider at the bottom.
Again, watch the eyes as I move this slider backwards and forwards, sorry, left and right.
Have them backwards and forwards?
You can see now again, add a lot more contrast into the eyes just like so.
That's just one adjustment layer and several adjustments we can do with it to make them
have a little bit more impact.
Already, that's before and after.
Before and after.
Now, the third step, what we're going to do is we're going to add another blank layer.
Let's just rename this one to "sharpness" because what we can do now is we can come
over to the toolbar.
We have this Sharpen tool here which is actually really, really good.
It's hardly ever used, I think, but it's very, very good.
At the top here, in the Options, we can choose how much strength we want the sharpening
to be, but the important one, because we want to work non-destructively, is to make sure
we have this Sample All Layers ticked.
That means we can now do this on a blank layer, so we can just come in now, paint over the
eyes with this Sharpness tool.
I haven't lifted off just yet.
I'm just painting down with it.
We can see straight away how much impact this sharpening is adding on to the eyes.
Again, it's all non-destructive.
Let's just zoom in so it's really, really obvious for you.
This is before, after, before, after.
That's three steps.
Obviously, that's looking way too much.
Look, if I hold down my Alt or Option key and just click on the eye icon of the original
background layer to turn everything off, we can see that's before, after, before, after.
That's three steps, three real simple steps you can add to your toolbox there.
Very, very quick technique to give the eyes impact which, I've got to say, works an absolute
treat when you're also using it on your black-and-white images.
Now, if you want to find the file to use, so you can go through this technique
as well with exactly the same image that I've used, just dive over to my website,
glyndewis.com.
If you are a subscriber to my newsletter, you will get access to this page here, where
all the YouTube videos I have, you'll be able to download the files so that you can follow
along with them as well.
If you're not a subscriber, all you need to do is go to the website.
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There you go.
It's just a very, very quick one for you.
I thought I'd dive in, and that's it.
Any questions, comments, please make sure that you leave those in the comments section.
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Thank you very much.
I'll see you next time.