Photo Editing: Put a Sparkle in
the Eye!
For the longest time I have been looking with
envy at th0se beautiful photos made by great
photographers and wondering how they get
sparkling clear eyes.
Getting
great looking eyes like that is not always easy;
the lighting and the focus need to be perfect.
My biggest tip for shooting clear eyes is to
make sure that you focus on the eyes and that
you can see the light reflecting in the eyes.
When shooting photos with a single lens reflex
camera, you can choose to shoot the face with a
large aperture because this will blur the
background, making the eyes look sharper.
But of course not all pictures turn out the way
you wish and unfortunately sometimes the eyes do
not have that fresh clear look that you wanted.
In that case, what is a girl to do? Well, this
girl turned to Adobe Photoshop for help! So now
that I have found a way to make the eyes look
clearer, I thought I'd share it with you.
Here’s how it goes:
Step 1:
The first step is to open the photo in Adobe
Photoshop! Then select the eye area!
I like to select more than just the eyes
because I found that that will give me the
most natural results. After the eyes
are selected, invert the selection so that
eyerything is now selected except the eyes.
Step 2:
The trick here is that we‘ll make everything
around the eye area look a little bit out of
focus so that the eyes appear clearer. (This
is the same effect that you get when you
shoot the photo with a large aperture.)
To get this result we need a soft focus
filter (try Filter>Gaussian blur). After you
have selected this filter you will get a
pop-up screen where you can choose the
radius by moving the slider.
In this case I blurred the face with the
radius at 4.5 pixels. But it is always good
to play around a little to see what effects
looks best on your photo!
Step 3:
Do Select>inverse to change the selection
back to only the eyes. Now it’s time
to make the eyes look sharper. The
sharpening filter is found at Filter>Unsharp
Mask (In PSE, this is found at Enhance>Unsharp
Mask.) After you have selected this
filter you will get a pop-up screen where
you can make your adjustments to the Amount,
Radius, and Threshhold using sliders.
In this case I have set the amount to 100%,
the radius to 7.1 pixels, and the threshold
to 14. But as I noted above, play around a
little with the settings to see what effect
looks best for your picture!
And here is the result! Beautiful clear eyes.
I hope you will have lots of fun trying this
yourself! See you next month.
