(gentle music)
- Now it's often said that the eyes
are the window to the soul,
but it can also make or break a portrait
if there's no detail and they're not sharp.
Now that can be for a whole host of reasons.
It could be the lens, it could be the lighting,
it could be whatever,
but it doesn't have to spell disaster
because here is a super fast technique
where we can fake the look of texture, detail and sharpness,
and really bring life back into those eyes.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so on the screen,
you can see the final retouched image,
but if I go to the other open tab,
this is actually the out of camera image.
And when I was zoom in,
you can see that although the eyes are in focus,
they don't actually look sharp
and that's because they lack texture and detail.
So in this technique, we're gonna fake the look
of texture and detail, which in turn
will fake the look of them being sharp.
Very, very easy to do,
and we'll do this eye here first of all,
so I'm gonna come over to the layers panel,
click to add a new blank layer,
I'll then come to the tool bar
and choose the elliptical marquee tool.
I'll hold down my shift key and click
and drag out a perfect circle.
And I can reposition that by holding down my space bar
and then dragging around the image
and I'm gonna put it around about there.
Next thing we do is go to the edit menu, choose fill.
And from the contents dropdown menu here,
we'll choose 50% grey and click, okay.
We keep that active selection present
because now we go to the filter menu,
choose noise and add noise.
Now this is a high resolution image.
So the amount I'm gonna be using is 25%
and we choose Gaussian
and monochromatic noise and then click okay.
Now I still keep that active selection
going around the outside for this next part,
where we go to the filter menu,
choose blur, and then we're gonna choose radial blur.
Now, if it's the first time you've used it by default,
you'll probably see that it's set
to the blur method of spin.
We're gonna change it to zoom.
And the amount I'm gonna go for
is around about 60, 65, something like that.
We'll then click okay.
Now when I take a close look, you can see what effect
that has actually created with our noise.
At this stage, we can get rid of the active selection.
So we go to the select menu
and choose de-select or the keyboard shortcut
of command on Mac, control on windows
and the letter D on your keyboard.
Now we need to use a blend mode
so that we can see the texture here and the eye.
So we come over to the layers panel, where it says normal,
we now open that menu up and just drag our cursor
over each name of the blend modes.
And as we do that in real time,
we can see how that's affecting that layer.
So the one I'm gonna choose to use here
is one called colour judge, I think that looks pretty good.
Now the moment can see there's way too much of this texture
and detail being added, we only need it on the eye,
not on the eyelid.
So what I'll now do is add a layer mask to this layer here.
I'm gonna get a brush with a black foreground colour.
Let's just check the hardness here.
We don't want it completely soft.
We don't want it completely hard.
I'm gonna go for a roundabout 20%,
making sure in the options bar
opacity is 100%, flow is 100,
and then what we can do is just come in and just remove it
off the eyelid by just brushing on there
and off the centre of the eye as well.
The pupil, just there.
And I'm also gonna brush around the outside
just to soften the edge just there.
So take it all the way around there.
So already we can see we've added some texture
and detail into the eye, now let's just rename this layer,
keep everything organised, we'll call this eye one.
Now, if you want to do the other eye,
which you more than likely will do,
you can either repeat all those steps or just hold down
the command key on Mac, control key on windows,
press J to jump a copy of that eye there onto a new layer.
You can see it's duplicated the effect.
We don't need to duplicate it.
We'll just click down with our move tool
and drag it over to the eye.
The only problem is at the moment
that the layer mask attached to it,
it's gonna be slightly different on this eye
to what it is on this eye.
So what we can do here is just maybe click
and drag that Lam mask into the trash.
We'll say delete, and then just add a new layer mask,
get that brush with a black foreground colour
and just remove it off there as well.
Paint it off the eye there, off the eyelid.
We'll paint it off the centre of the eye.
And we'll also brush around the outside
just to soften that down just a little bit.
So a the moment, we can see we've got texture
and detail in the eye.
We might want to increase that.
And an easy way of doing that
is to have both of these layers now into a group.
So the upper layer highlighted,
I'll hold on the shift key and click on the layer below.
So they're both highlighted. come to the fly out menu
in the top right-hand corner of the layers panel
and choose new group from layers.
And we'll call that eye detail.
Then what I'm going to do is add a levels adjustment
and making sure that this adjustment now
only affects the layers in the group directly below,
not the main picture, just the group directly below.
So to do that, I'm gonna click on this
little icon here called a clipping mask.
When we do that, you see the actual adjustment here
moves over to the right-hand side,
and an arrow appears with like an angle to it saying, look,
I'm only gonna affect this group below just here,
and to increase the contrast,
I'll just bring over the whites and bring over the black,
something like that.
There we go, now you can obviously now come in
if you wanted to, adjust the opacity
of this eye detail group,
but now look, if I turn this off and on, off and on,
we have definitely brought the eyes back to life,
they look sharper, there's more detail and more texture.
So there you go, I told you it was a fast one.
Of course it doesn't replace getting it bang on in camera,
but it sure is a good one to be able to fall back on
just in case, but that's me done.
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but that's it, I'll see you in the next video.
(gentle music)