Catchlights in the eye

JoHawk

On my last shoot I was able to capture some great portrait pics, only to notice that the catch lights in the eye cover the pupil and I now have an alien looking eye.

What is the best way to remove the catch light for a natural looking pupil in Photoshop? As it has ruined the pic.

arodney

In the old analog days, we'd just take a very sharp xacto knife and produce tiny paper white catchlights in each pupil carefully aligned on the print itself. I can't see why you can't do the same in Photoshop. Maybe zoom in a great deal and just draw them in using off white and the pencil tool or similar (on a layer ideally).

kdog

If there's a portion of the pupil that wasn't covered by the catchlight, then you need to laboriously rebuild the pupil by cloning pixels of the uncovered region to recreate the rest of the pupil, leaving just enough of the catchlight to be pleasing. If there's not enough undecimated pupil for this purpose, then perhaps you can find a shot with acceptable pupils from the same person and paste them in, or perhaps borrow the entire eyes. I will often do that to get one usable shot out of a group series where every shot had someone blink.

JoHawk

Cheers Kdog.. I will give it a go.. stealing eyes sounds like fun..

divamum

Can you post an example?

kdog

JoHawk wrote: »

Cheers Kdog.. I will give it a go.. stealing eyes sounds like fun..

The really weird part is when you go to paste the new eyes in, they kind of snap into place once you get them close. Try it, I swear it's true.