Retouching eyes with a little bit of fakery in Photoshop

Hi there, in this video we are going to retouch the eyes with, I'm going to say medium faking. We're going to add all this lovely detail into the eye. We know it's probably there, but it's milky and gray in the actual photograph. Let's look at how to create this now in Photoshop. 

First thing is, if you're working through the tutorials, you can save and close the last one, it will save as a PSD. What I want to do is just reopen the JPG again. So from '10 Retouching', open up 'Eyes 1'. And we're back here. So what we want to do is we want to grab the 'Adjustments Panel', and we're going to use 'Levels'. What we really want to do is, we're not worried too much about the rest of the document, we're just kind of zooming in on the eyes here, we want to enhance the eyes. And when I say enhance, we're not here to make them perfect. We just want more color out of it. Just a richer, lighter color. Even a bit extreme. So we're not worried about this, we're just getting some, let's have a look, on, off. Just a lot more light here in the eyes. 

Next we want to do is, I want to remove this mask. You can click on the mask and just say, 'Invert' it. So I'm not really removing it, we're just painting it all in with black. And what we want to do is, with our 'Brush Tool', have white as the foreground color. And in terms of the size, it's going to get super small and super soft. So mine is 5 pixels, hardness of 0. Let's turn down the Opacity a bit. When I say a bit, a lot, I'm going to zoom in. What we want to do now is draw in the little lines that appear in her eyes. Even that's too thick. So I'm going to go down even smaller, 2 pixels, it will depend on your image. Something small like that. Because what we're trying to do, I'll show you this example. You can see this, kind of gross zoom up of an eye. You can see all this detail in here, and that's what kind of, that kind of milky way galaxy awesome lines in here. Really help an image stand out, plus we want these kind of, like little ripples in here. 

So we're going to use this as our visual guide, because what we're going to do is draw out little lines. And once you get started, it's going to look a bit weird, and you're like, "There's no way this is going to work." But keep building it up. What you'll find, if you're like me, I can draw down fine, drawing up this way, it's a bit kind of weird. So what you can do is hold down the 'R' key, hold it, hold it, click and drag, let go of it. And it means you can kind of just work around this eye, in what's maybe just a bit more natural selection. Don't worry if it's not all perfect, because there's kind of cross hatching loopy stuff. It is fine, plus we're going to turn it off a little bit, lower it down later on. 

So what we're doing really is, we're not really drawing on it, we're just showing through in our mask, if I 'Option' click the mask, or 'Alt' click the mask, we're just making little holes in it so we can see through. If I disable it, this kind of bright area. That's what makes it look a little bit more natural than maybe just painting with the Dodge Tool. So keep going. Just keep overlapping, working your way around. R key, if you want to get rid of it, you don't like the rotation anymore, 'Esc' key kind of gets it back to square one. R key again. What I'm going to try and do now, is I'm going to try and do some of those little loops. 

Now I'm using my mouse mainly because, if I use the Wacom, it comes out a lot better, and often people aren't using like a tablet. Tablet, the nice thing about it is that you'll end up having a little bit, these are quite like fat lines, or at least they're not tapered at the end. So if you're using a Wacom tablet you'll end up with just kind of nicer tapered line. So if you are using a Wacom, you might find your result a little bit nicer. You can start to see, it's getting there. I'll hit 'Esc'. There's a few little bits around the outside here that I need to remove. Got a bit crazy with it, so with the mask selected, I have black as my foreground color, I'm just going to paint these out. So it's not coming over the edges here. Not realistic. 

Now we're doing with lighter colors, you can do the same thing. You can grab, in 'Adjustments Layer', I'm going to turn this one off. Go to 'Levels', and in this one I'm going to darken it down, and do the same thing, click on the 'Mask', 'Invert' it. I'm going to turn the other layer back on, with this one on the top, I've got my layer selected, I'm just going to paint in some of the darker bits. Same thing, same sort of brush. What did I have? 2, 3 pixels? Can't remember. Make sure white's your foreground color, and just kind of paint in a few of these other bits. I'm going to raise opacity of mine to maybe 60%. Maybe some shorter little lines. Zoom out a little bit. What do you think? It's kind of cool. So turn these off, turn these on. This goes into my little bit of fake, but clear conscience retouching. They're probably in there. I just kind of brought them out, you can see my terrible drawing. Actually kind of adds to this effect. 

What I might do just to finish it up is, Background Layer, I'm going to duplicate it, because I'm going to do some dodging on this. Dodging has to happen on the pixels. It's destructive, so I'm going to do it on its own layer. So 'Dodge Tool', like in the last one, I'm going to just enhance these a bit. I'm set to Midtones, it's not what I want. I want to grab the highlights. I got my exposure down quite low, and I'm just going to pop these up a little bit. Same with the eyes, not much. Actually these need to be Midtones, because they're quite gray, they're not operating, we know they're white, but Photoshop sees them. It's kind of Midtones, do the same over here, just a little bit. Same for that. Maybe switch to the Burn Tool. And I am going to burn the Iris. 

You'll see that we don't have it over here so I'm going to grab both these layers. I'm going to hold down my-- I'm going to go to my 'Move Tool'. Hold down my 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC to duplicate them. And you can see, I'm just moving the mask which is quite cool. So even though this side here is a lot darker, it's not bringing all these light bits, it's just bringing the mask across, showing through the darker version of the side, quite realistic if you ask me. You could go and redo it for this side as well if you wanted. If you felt like there was some repeating bits, that were quite obvious. I think it's not, I think it's fine. So let's compare it. Let's look at the Background Layer here. Let's hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC, and it just turns them all off except for this one, and all back on, all on, all off. 

So get this eye especially, my favorite eye, it's the good eye. What I might do with the dodging there, always go too far, just lower it down a bit. On, off, a bit nicer. Click again, 'Option' or 'Alt', click this. I'm happy with that, if you're not happy with that, we're going to steal a trick from the last tutorial. So just a new layer on top of everything else. Let's call this one 'Eye Color'. I'm just going to use our 'Blending Mode' again. So 'Brush Tool', I've picked a, color for the eyes, it can be a different color. I was going to use the same color, brown. Turn my Opacity up. Make sure that edges of your brushes are kind of fuzzy, so you don't get into the whites of the eyes. 

You can color it all in, it's pretty basic. Wow, pretty simple tool to do. I'm not changing the color, you could totally change the color if you were using green or blue. Now the trick is to find a believable Blending Mode. Like we did before, 'Move Tool', hold 'Shift', hit '+', and just work your way through until it becomes like a werewolf vampire. 'Color Dodge', for something a little bit more believable. Color Dodge is working for me, it's just the Opacity. So I'm just going to tap the number keys, '50'. I'm going to come right down to maybe 30%. On, off. Now let's check it, let's hold down the 'Option' key, 'Alt' key. All right, looking cool. If you still want more, there's one more eye retouching video, where we totally fake it. It's kind of creepy, but it's kind of fun. And it works 60% of the time, every time, I'll see you there.