The Sprague Lab

Welcome to Photoshop Friday!

We’re going to talk about photos today. And I’ll share a little eye-popping secret. :)

I received portions of this information from a tutorial over at NOBS photo. Thanks to them. :)

Making Eyes Pop.

*clearing throat* The eyes are the windows to the soul. :)

But wait! It’s true. As humans, we’re drawn to the lightest parts of a painting. And photographers can use the same technique in portraits. The lightest part of a portrait photograph? The catchlights in someone’s eyes. So awesome.

But what if you have so-so catchlights and you want to really help them pop? Here are a few steps to try.

Open the photo you’d like to try the technique on. It has to be someone/thing where you can see eyes, and works better when the catchlights are clearly visible.

I’m going to use this photo of my neice, which I took a couple weeks ago at a park in Utah. I’ve already run Amber Ludlow’s conversion on it to brighten up the whole thing. (BTW, this completely ROCKS and I recommend it to anyone who wants an easy way to really make an entire image pop - just send her an email for more info).

The pic looks pretty good, but I want to really make her eyes shine in this. So we are going to “dodge the catchlights”, a pretty typical professional photographer technique. Dodge, in essence, lightens up specific parts of an image.

1. Pick the Dodge tool. It’s over in the toolbar, hiding in the same menu as Burn and Sponge.
2. Set it to a small round brush. Depending on your image resolution, this might be 3-9 pixels.
3. Set it to Highlights and 100%. (If you want to start out with a subtler effect and build on it, you can set this to 50%)
4. Zoom in on the image (you can use the navigator palette or hit Z and click on the eyes a couple times).
5. (hit o to return to the Dodge tool if you used Zoom). Tap a few times on the very lightest parts of the catchlights. You should see them brighten. *Don’t overdo this. Keep it subtle*

1. While you’re zoomed in on the eyes, choose the circular marquee tool (hit M).
2. Select the iris portion of the eye. Use the Shift key while you select to add portions to your selection, and also to select the second eye, like so (hint: the Shift key adds to any selection, and the Alt key subtracts from any selection):




3. When you’re happy with your selection, hit Ctrl-J to copy the selection onto its own layer.
4. Run an Unsharp Mask on the eyes layer. I use Scott Kelby’s default settings to start with: 85%, Radius 1, Threshold 4. *Don’t overdo this. Keep it subtle.*
5. When you’re happy with the sharpness of the eyes, merge the eye layer back onto the photo layer, run an unsharp mask on the whole image, and you’re ready to go!