Hi, I'm Chelsea and today I'm going to show you how to use Lightroom to enhance
eyes.
I'm not going to provide a photo file today because you can just follow along
on any portrait, but I recommend that it's a woman because i'll do a little
bit of makeup and you don't want to do that to a man or a child. I mean, maybe you do.
You know what, I take that back, you just, you do what you want.
Okay, so the first thing that I'm going to do is select the adjustment brush and
the effect that I'm going to use is iris enhance.
And I'll make my brush a bit bigger,
you can press O to turn on your mask. If you want to change the color, press shift+O
and you can do green, white, dark.
I'm going to go with red since my eyes are green.
And I'm just selecting the iris, not the pupil or the whites of the eyes.
So if you press O again, then you get rid of your mask and you can see that the
iris enhance just kind of sharpens and, well you can see exactly in this panel here
what it's doing. It enhances the clarity and the saturation a little bit and ups
the exposure.
And it's subtle. I should mention i'm keeping it really subtle,
I always see that the eyes can kind of be over enhanced, so what I'm guessing is
going to happen, because this is what always happens to me, is that I do all
the edits and then it will make the person look like a crazy
creepy-eyed person and then you go in and you dial it all back about twenty, thirty percent.
So I'm just going to stick with that. It's going to be my method.
Okay, so i created a new adjustment brush and now I'm going into my effects and
i'm selecting dodge because i want to lighten.
And can I zoom in more?
Oh lord, I can't zoom in more but i'm just going to
here let me put on my mask, select the whites of the eyes, and if you're a
little bit sloppy like I'm being that's okay. Because you can go to the erase brush.
And let's see, let me put my flow almost all the way up and drop the size
and clean up my selection a bit. I'm just gonna subtly
whiten the eyes, brighten them a little bit.
The whites, rather. I think that overly-whitened
whites is one of those things that can make enhancing the eyes look
really unnatural and creepy.
When you look at a portrait of somebody, you don't want to think, "wow, your eyes are terrifying ."
You want to think, "that's a nice portrait" or "that's a good picture of uncle Bob
and aunt Susan."
Okay, so let's see.
This is where the exposure was,
and then it just raised it a little bit. If you want to incrementally
raise these, you can just hover over them and use the up and down keys or left and right.
and that's subtle.
Sometimes if my eyes are red, or my subjects eyes are red, I'll also just lower
the saturation a little bit, not too much because you get, it gets very grey looking.
Just raising the highlights a little.
And then I created a new adjustment brush and the next thing that I'm going to do is
lighten again, and this time I'm going to lighten around the eyes.
I'll make my brush a bit bigger and just doing like a triangle under the eyes.
Because when you lighten under the eyes that actually brings out the eyes.
This is something people do when they do makeup.
And I'll go to my erase brush again and lower the flow
and then just blend this in. Let me make my brush bigger, and blend it in.
And you'll notice that I did kind of a triangle under the eyes, kind of like what you see when
you use Rembrandt lighting. If you're into that sort of thing.
Ok, I'll make a new adjustment brush again,
a new mask again, and I'm going to also lighten around the eyes and do this
part of the eye here, that makes the eyes look bigger, and right above the pupil, that
makes the eyes look wider.
I bet you're like, "woah, Chelsea knows a lot about eyes."
It's true. I do.
If you lighten under the eyebrow, that makes the arch look higher, which I don't really need but...
"I don't need it." It sounds like I think I'm cool. I'll select a new adjustment brush and now I'm going
to do some burning.
I'm kinda like, all over the place.
Maybe I should have just done the iris, but you know what? I'm just gonna go with it.
You gotta do what works for you.
And I'm just selecting the lash line, let me put on my mask so you can see what I'm doing.
I'm getting into the lash line,
I don't want to go too far here because then if you put dark colors on the
inside of the eyes it makes them look closer together and usually not like a
look that people are going for. And I'll use my erase tool.
Oh, my flow is down.
And just get it out of
my eyes and off of my waterline, this part right above the lashes. This is the
waterline and you want that to be lighter not darker, because that makes
your eyes look bigger.
And you can see if I
adjust it down, what I did- ah! I kind of like using that as a guide, let me see.
I'm just going to blend it in a bit more
That's a lot of making new brushes.
I just keep pressing new over and over again. The reason why you do that is because you
can go into any of these little pins and you can see what you adjusted and you
can go back and readjust them.
So just making a lot of new pins, a lot of new adjustment brushes, means that you
have more control over your final edit. So I can go back in and say, "well the whites
look too bright" and I can specifically change that.
I brightened a lot of things, but if I linked the whites of the eyes with the
lightening I did around the eyes, then maybe one thing was bright enough but
another thing wasn't or vice versa, and I wouldn't have control over that. I'd have
to erase things and redo them. So this just makes it easier to go back and
adjust every little change that you make. You can see this is the iris brightening and
you can see it all right there.
Okay, so I'll make a new adjustment layer, I'm going to go back into burn and
you can see i'm selecting these effects but then I kind of go in and customize
them.
You can do that too, I recommend that.
One thing that brings out the eyes is enhancing the dark line around the iris,
especially if the person has light eyes, because then it makes the brighter inner
part of the iris
stand out. There's more contrast. And you can see there's a line there.
And I don't want to be too dark.
This layer, I think i'm actually going to add
a little sharpening to that. There we go.
I'm making a new brush, and then I'm
keeping it in burn and I'm going to add a little bit of make up. Which you don't have
to do, but i want to do that.
I'm adding it here. When you're adding eyeshadow, you usually want to
follow this line here from the corner of the eye to the edge of the eyebrow,
unless the person has done something really unusual with their eyebrows, like
where the natural eyebrow would be. You want to go from the corner of their eyebrow and
just follow this pattern.
And then you can go a little bit into your lower lash line too.
My hair is here so I'm just gonna have to
pretend that it's not.
Alright, so I'll erase this part and then i'm going to lower the flow on
my erase brush and just blend in
what I did.
I'll increase the flow because
I just want to make sure that there is none in my eye.
And I'll turn off my mask.
And I'll lower the exposure a little bit and then I want to also change the color.
And I have green eyes so I'm going to go towards the purpley color and then also bring down
the blues a little bit, ooh no, too much.
And now I have eye shadow! And if you
bring up the highlights a little bit then you get some of the natural skin
underneath and it looks more natural,
it looks more like it's on my skin than if I did this, it just looks like it
looks flat, it looks like it's just sitting on top. So you do this and then the
natural highlights of the skin shows through and it looks like makeup is
actually applied.
Okay, so we have eye shadow,
eyeliner, brightened whites, enhanced iris, everything a little bit sharpened.
Let's do the eyebrow, because that's important too, eyebrows frame your face
and your eyes.
So if they're not well defined, then your eyes don't show as much, they don't pop
out as much.
Popping eyes, that's important. Okay, so I have a new adjustment layer and it's
burn, and you don't want to do too much.
You don't want the person looks strange but just
naturally define their eyebrows. And your eyebrows should be at the edge of your nose and
then out at an angle from the side of your eye to your nose like this.
So from the corner of the nose to the edge of the eye, up.
Dang, my eyebrows are on point.
ok
That's pretty good, I don't think they're too dark.
So let me zoom out and press Y to see the before and after. I don't think I went too
far this time actually. Normally what i would do is kind of take a break
because I've been acclimating to all of these adjustments. Go get a drink or a
snack or whatever,
go do something els,e come back and look at it again. And if your first thought is
like "whoa,
way too much to the eyes," then you know you have to go in and kind of undo some of
your edits. But sitting here now, maybe i'm wrong, but it looks pretty good.
Oh so one last thing that you may or may not want to do is add more eyelashes.
Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't ,it can depend on the picture.
I have more control in Photoshop but I'm just keeping these videos to Lightroom.
I get people asking me that sometimes, but i will get to doing
Photoshop videos, but for now, this is what's happening.
Ok so we want the size of the brush all the way down, is that small as it goes?
And the exposure all the way down just so you can see what you're doing. And you
want to follow where the lashes already are and make them longer.
I know what you're thinking, you're like "this look like a spider's leg, Chelsea,
this looks stupid." You're right. But it's going to get better.
So you want to follow the natural arch.
This is a lot easier with my wacom tablet, if you're into drawing, you want
to follow the natural patterns of eyelashes, you can see that they
crisscross. You can add like
another one like that and like that. I feel like because I can't- I think it's the size
of the picture, it's not letting me make my brush as small as I want. It works
better when your brush can be smaller. But, so this is what you do and you make
the lashes a little bit longer because what you're going to do is go to the
erase brush and put the flow down a bit and then you're going to erase the tips
so that these fake hairs that you're making naturally taper off like real
hairs.
Those look a little bit crummy, but it takes a little bit of practice to get them straight and
And now we adjust the exposure so that they're far more subtle.
And then you can see it just makes the eye lashes a
bit thicker. That's a cool trick. So if you like this video, subscribe because i'll
have more coming up soon. I'll have more lightroom videos coming out, longer ones
on doing things like portraits and landscapes. Shorter ones on enhancing
eyes and lips and all sorts of things like that. And we'll also have some
photoshop videos coming out soon. So subscribe, like, share if you liked it and
if you really want to learn a lot about lightroom, check out our book, our
lightroom 5 book
I think it's good and I think you will too. Thanks, bye.