Fully faking believable eyes in Adobe Photoshop

Hi there, this video is all about fully freaking an eye. We take the original image here, we fill out all the detail in the eye by doing something a little bit creepy with this one. All right, time to get creepy. From your 10 Retouching folder open up Eyes 1 and 2 again. You might have to save and close the previous exercise. So 1 and Creepy Eye 2, and yes, it is what you imagined. So I found this eye mainly because it has a full kind of pupil in here. So I can use it for all sorts of situations. What sorts of situations? One eye is blinking, one eye is closed, one eye is a little bit lower than the rest of them. They're just really out of focus. 

So the previous two videos are just not going to work. I am going to grab my 'Quick Selection Tool'. I'm going to select all of this. There's some bits up here that I don't want. Do not worry too much about it, this is quite a forgiving tutorial; believe it or not. Holding down the 'Alt' key or the 'Option' key, just to kind of tidy it up a little bit. Let's see what it looks like as a mask. Let's go to 'Select & Mask' and just tidy it up a little bit. Probably some feathering, it's going to be nice. Too much, I'm going to shift the edge in a bit. Smooth it out a little bit. Yes, it's going to work for me. See what the radius does. Nothing. All right, let's click 'OK'. 

So this eye now is going to be moved to this layer here. You can copy and paste it. Just drag it in like this, it's far too big. I'm going to scale it down. I'm going to get it close to where I need it to go. Now the trick is to be in, just seeing one eye, can you see two of them? One of them blue, one of them not, starts off creepy. This gets less and less creepy as we move along, I promise. I've got it roughly in position. Maybe a little bit bigger. Here we go. Hit 'Return'. Working on the mask, I'm going to grab my 'Brush Tool'. I'm going to be working with white. Weird black. And I'm going to have about this sort of size, hardness at 0, but I'm going to lower the opacity of it by just tapping the numbers key on my keyboard. You can see opacity, 30, 40, 20, or 42. It's about 20%. I'm just going to work this bit at the top here where the eyelid is, and same with this bit here, maybe just a bit bigger to get these in. 

I'm going to do the same thing for this edge here, it's just too sharp. The lights are hitting it the right way. So this light's cast this way, you might have to flip the eyeball over, if your light's hitting it the wrong way, because it might just look a little stranger than it does at the moment. And what I really came for is, I really want all this kind of detail in here. So instead of drawing it out by hand, like we did in the last video, I'm now going to click on my actual, not the mask, I'm going to click on the actual layer, and I'm going to work my way through, and try and find a Blending Mode that works. I'm going to use our shortcut. 'Move Tool', 'Shift +'. Plus '+' goes forward, minus '-' goes back through the options. That's kind of cool, which one, the Color Dodge. 

You can see there, less creepy, but we've got a lot of that kind of detail in there, that's maybe a bit more natural, but it's not necessarily this person's eye. I'm happy with that. We'll come back to Color Dodge. Let's have a look what else we got. Will this work? Probably not. Way too bright, so let's go through. Exclusion's kind of cool. I keep this in here because there is a lot of just kind of, going through these, and going, "Oh it kind of works, but that one doesn't." In this case Color Dodge works for me, so I'm going to just duplicate that eye. Over here, add the detail into it. It's blending nicely with the background. What I might do is duplicate this background again. 

This one's going to be a Retouch Layer because I want Dodge Burn, so 'Dodge'. Clickety click. Clickety click. You can run it around the edge here, because these Blending mode Color Dodge responds to it, it's going to kind of brighten them up, it's probably not what I want to do. Undo, now you can. I'm going to switch to the Burn Tool by holding down the 'Option' or 'Alt' key. Just kind of darken up these centers here. I'm going to zoom out. Let's check what we've done. Let's hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC. I really like it. 

Now in this case there is already a strong kind of light cast. See the reflection there. If yours doesn't, you can add another one, so just add another layer. This is going to be my highlight. Grab the 'Brush Tool', and drop down the brushes. And in here there's a bunch of-- it depends on what version of Photoshop you're using. Go through and find-- like you can get away with murder in terms of reflection. Sometimes there's the strong kind of light that's coming from a window pane, or in this case, it's a bit of a kind of a mixture, coming through the trees in this case. 

So I'm going to go to 'Dry Media Brushes', and I'm going to pick one of these, I'm going to use this one here; Kyle's Ultimate Charcoal Pencil. I'm going to have white as my foreground color. I'm working on this layer here, zoom in. I'm going to just add my own, so what size brush? This one here, I might lower the opacity a little bit as well. It's actually the flow in this case. I'm just adding these, I'm trying to kind of pick it a little bit. Do the same to this side. It's not quite ready yet because what I want to do is, once I've got it here, play with the Layer Mode again. I rely on Layer Modes a lot in Photoshop, just because they're so useful for blending things in. You see there, enhanced it up. They're different from normal, let's have a look. A little bit less, let's have a look at anything else in there. 

Layer Modes. I think it's off light, that is the one for me. Giving me a different consistency on this lighter eye and this darker eye. You might lower the opacity of it down a little bit. Maybe a little bit more. We're actually done now, hold down 'Option', Hold down 'Option' or 'Alt', give that last one a click. Some pretty cool eyes, they're not hers, not all of it anyway. So that is going to be us. There's three ways of doing eyes; enhancing it, a little bit of faking, and then using creepy eye. They all have their place, I hope you found them useful. I'll see you in the next video.