Photoshop Tutorials – Eye Sharpening Tutorial – Ashley McNamara – San Francisco Photographer

When I was first starting out in Photography I remember looking at my favorite photographer’s pictures and wondering “How on earth did they get those glassy eyes?” and every time I would try I would get what photographers call Alien eyes which are super bright and unreal looking eyes… There are about 1001 different ways to do a single thing in Photoshop and over the years I have tried many eye enhancing techniques and today I am going to share one technique that works for me. This girl already has stunning eyes so we’re not going to do too much to them.

Step 1: Open Photo

Step 2: Select the Magnetic Lasso tool.

Step 3: In the “feather” box put in 5 or 10 pixels. This is going to soften the edges of your Lasso tool.

Step 4: Using the magnetic lasso outline the iris of each eye. Once you outline the first iris hold shift and outline the second iris.

Step 5: Once the iris of each eye is outlined right click and select “Layer via copy”

Step 6: On the eye layer go to filter, other, and high pass

Step 7: When the high pass box pops up, use the slider to select how sharp you want the iris. I have mine set to 34.5 pixels. Once you press OK the iris will look sort of weird but don’t worry. Move onto step 8.

Step 8: Once you select OK go to your layers pallet and make sure the eye layer is selected and select “soft light” in the drop down box.

Step 9: Once you have soft lighted the eye layer the eyes should be sharper/glassier. If you want to enhance the effect even more you can do a curves adjustment on the same eye layer.

Now you’re done! Easy Peasy! Here is the before and after.