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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

Enhancing eyes in Adobe Photoshop CC

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we are going to do retouching of the eyes. I'm turning it on and off to see the before and after. We're just doing subtle adjustments. We can go the Full Monty, and kind of go full blown. I've been here in Photoshop retouching mode, will show you both. You'll also see, we do more than just the eyes as well. We kind of go off on a bit of a tangent and show you how to use the exact same tools that we use for the eyes to work with, say like the hair and the jaw line. Let's jump into it now. 
Let's open up our image, let's go to 'File', let's go to 'Open'. Then your retouching file, we're going to use 'Eyes 01'. First thing to do is we need to duplicate this layer because we want to be able to go back to it later on and see what the original look like. So right click it, say 'Duplicate Layer'. I'll call this one 'Retouch'. Now we do the whites of the eyes first and we use it-- I'm zooming a little bit. We're going to use the Dodge Tool, so the Dodge Tool, depending on what last tool you used, is in this little group here, is this little pedal thing here. With it selected, up the top here we used this a little earlier when we did our paint drips and Mid Tones, worked great then. In this case, because we're working on the whites of the eyes or the highlights in the eyes, we want to be on Highlights. 
Now Exposure, we're going to have it 50. Yours is probably set like that by default. Brush size, something appropriate in the eye here. I've got 70, and I've made sure my Brush Hardness is down at 0. Now the Protect Tones is optional. It works fine with it on in this case, but if you're working, you're finding it's making the eyes kind of really gray, you might try tuning that off. And all we need to do, make sure we're on 'Retouch Layer' and click, hold, and kind of drag over a little bit. 
Now I've kept mine quite high at 50. So that you can kind of see what I'm doing, I'm just kind of little bits-- now that is way too high. What I mean by that is, it's just kind of coming on real strong. I leave it at 50 just so that you can see what I'm doing. When I'm actually doing it, I'm undoing, stepping backwards. I'll often be at something like 20% and build it up slowly. It's a little hard to see when you kind of just working it up slowly. So maybe a slightly smaller brush, 60. Clicking, dragging. All the whites of the eyes or the reflections on the eyes to be a bit brighter as well. Don't worry if you go a bit too far. I think I've gone a little bit too far there. A bit too far there, crank that up because what we'll do is - let's zoom back a little bit. - is because it's on its own layer at the end when we finish this, we're going to turn down the opacity. Watch this, I'll turn it right down. You just find this kind of happy medium of like believability versus overcooked Photoshopped. 
So it's okay to be a little bit overcooked because you can just lower this opacity showing the layer underneath. Now zoom out. I'm going to tap the eyeball on, eyeball off. So that's a kind of how to fix the whites of the eyes. I feel like I've gone a little bit too far over here. So that's the Dodge tool, lightens things up. I'm going to have the opacity back at 100% for the moment. Let's grab the Burn Tool, which darkens things. We've used it for shadows in the past. It's really handy for a couple of things when you're retouching. One is, fix up eyebrows It's not fixing them up, just kind of like giving them an extra bit of fullness. You can also use it to kind of enhance cheek bones. 
I've got mine on Mid Tones, I've got the exposure up probably too high because I'm going to turn it down to like 20%, you can see up there. I'm just going to kind of tweak in here, not too much. Just to enhance the kind of jawline. On, off. It's not particularly subtle, but you get what I mean, right? So dodging kind of lifts the eyes, and a Burn Tool kind of helps you fill in a bit of the moodiness. We'll lower down the overall opacity at the end. 
One last thing I'll do when I'm doing this type of thing is to play with the saturation. And it's a mixture of desaturating and saturating. What I mean by that is, this thing here, called the Sponge Tool. So we've used Dodge, Burn, we use the Sponge Tool. By default I think it's set to Desaturate. That can be really handy, I'm going to go down here. It's probably set a little high at 50% but I guess I just want to show you how it's working. There's some colors, kind of yellow. I can double click that a couple of times. It's a little hard to see, but it just kind of removes some of that kind of yellowness that can come through on the eye, so that's desaturation. 
What I use that a lot more of is the saturation. I'm going to pick a slightly big brush size and I'm going to saturate the eyes just a little bit. I'm just clicking once or twice, four times even. So there's just a little bit more of the exact same color in there, just that it's a little bit more of it. Same with the hair, I'm going to pick a nice big paint brush. Way bigger, using my square brackets. And I'm just going to click, hold, and drag across the hair a little bit. It's hard to know how much it's doing. It's smaller for across here but bigger in here. So, gone too far, that's okay because we're going to lower the opacity, but can you see what I mean by the hair just getting a little bit richer? 
I'm also going like, I guess 50% over because I know I'm going to tone down the opacity which was set at thousand times already, but I don't want you judging my retouching, not yet anyway. Now I'm going to lower this opacity and just kind of find, how we've been between 0 and 100. 100, too much, 0, nothing. And just find this kind of realistic but happy medium. Mine feels about 40%, it really depends on what you're going for. If you're going full glam then you might crank it up to like 200%. Start using the Burn Tool to put in Mascara, really enhance that jawline, but guess I'm just trying to go for believability. It’s hard when you do a retouch because for you to do your job really well people need to not know that you had anything to do with it. Like there's no job recognition. If people think, "Oh great, that's been Photoshopped," you've done a bad job. 
So we used the Dodge tool to lighten parts, we used the Burn Tool to darken parts, and we used the Sponge Tool to both desaturate the eyes and saturate the things we want colored. You could do the same for the lips. You could desaturate that background there to kind of enhance the model to bring the model forward. What I want you to do is to practice your skills, so go to 'File', 'Open'. There's one in here called Eyes 02. I want you to do the same thing here, dodging, burning, and using the Sponge Tool, but don't forget, before you get started, just duplicating that layer so that you can turn it back later on. Here might also be a good time to just touch up. There's a couple of spots on the skin. Using the Spot Healing Brush that we learned earlier on. 
Let's get into the next video where we look at teeth in particular. If you are working on this one, you start working on the teeth and it does something weird, goes gray or yellow. I'm going to show you some tricks for that in the next video. See you over there.