Brighten and recolor eyes effectively in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I'll show you a simple and effective method to make eyes shine in Photoshop and customize them to your desired color tone. These techniques are particularly helpful for enhancing portrait images and making the gaze of your subjects more lively and inviting. You only need a few basic tools within Photoshop and you'll be amazed at how easy it is to achieve impressive results.

Main Takeaways

You'll learn how to brighten eyes with just three layers and easily change the color to a desired tone. The entire process is clear and comprehensible, allowing you to achieve results quickly.

Step-by-Step Guide

To brighten eyes, we'll start by creating a new gradient curve in Photoshop.

First, you can delete the group and content to start with a clean workspace. Edge-Only: Be sure to select only the eyes you want to edit.

Now add a gradient curve. Go to Corrections and click on Gradient Curves. A new window will open where you can adjust the midtones.

Pull the midtones up - about enough to be noticeable. To apply these changes only to the eyes, we'll use a layer mask. Press Ctrl + I to make the curve invisible at first, then create a copy of the layer.

Now, use a brush with white foreground color to make the eye areas visible. Set the brush hardness to about 30% and opacity to around 35%. This way, you can gently paint over the eyes.

Now zoom in and carefully paint along the eyes. Keep checking the before-and-after effect to better see the progress.

To make the eyes even more radiant, add another gradient curve. Set this one to "Negative multiply" mode. This time, you'll emphasize only the iris by carefully painting around it.

Be careful not to overdo the application of this change to avoid irregular results.

If the eyes appear too intense after editing, you can reduce the opacity of the gradient curve again, for example, to about 60%. This will achieve a more harmonious look.

To further sharpen the eyes, create a new blank layer. Use the sharpen tool and set the strength to about 50%. Check "Include all layers".

Zoom in and use the sharpen tool along the eyes to further highlight them. Again, keep checking the difference here as well.

Finally, I'll show you how to change the color of the eyes. Create a new layer, choose a color like green, and lightly paint over the eyes.

To make the new color visible, change the blending mode to, for example, "Multiply." You will immediately see how the eye color changes.

You can try out different blending modes to achieve interesting effects and find the perfect color for your eyes. Feel free to experiment with it to get the best out of your image.

Summary

In this tutorial, you have learned how to easily and effectively brighten and recolor eyes. With just a few adjustments in Photoshop, you can achieve amazing results that enhance your portrait photos.