A technique for eye

rutt

Recently I've been fooling around with trying to get better eyes and been liking the results.

Before:



After:



And the recipe:

1. Convert to LAB
2. Make a duplicate layer
3. Shadow/highlight on the L channel of the duplicate layer. Get the eyes light. Go too far. Make them too light. The rest of the image will look really bad. Don't worry.
4. Duplicate the background layer and move above the SH layer from the previous step.
5. Add a layer mask to the topmost layer and reveal the eyes with fairly high opacity.
6. Adjust the opacity of the middle (SH adjusted) layer until the eyes look right.

You can also sharpen the eyes independently at this point (I think Yuri does this.) But I like to do this adjustment fairly early and then sharpen at the end, so I don't. And I find that sharpening the C+K channels works better for faces that sharpening the eyes locally.

edgework

rutt wrote:

Recently I've been fooling around with trying to get better eyes and been liking the results.

A trick I picked up studying one of Andrzej Dragon's layered files is to smear white on top of the eyes on a Soft Light layer, then hide all with a layer mask and selectively paint back with low opacity brush strokes. It's a good way to custom design the brightness where there's a lot of variation between light and dark.