From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

Making eyes sparkle - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop Portrait Retouching

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Making eyes sparkle

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look how we can add a little bit of sparkle to the eyes in our photographs. And to do that, we'll explore how we can work with a filter and a hand-painted mask. We'll be working on this portrait here, and this one is a work in progress. You can see I've included two layers in this file. We have the original image as it appeared straight out of the camera, and then next I did some retouching, just like the retouching that we've done in the previous chapters, a little bit of spot-healing, little bit of work on the shadows, and you can see how I've cleaned up the photograph. Now, next what I want to do is add some sparkle to the eyes. I want to bring out some more detail to that area of the image. Now, if you've done some retouching on your photographs and you're ready to work on the eyes, the first step that you want to take in order to use this technique is to merge everything to the topmost layer. The one way you can do that is by way of a keyboard shortcut. It's a complicated one but it's worth knowing how to use it. You press shift option command e on a Mac, shift alt control e on Windows. That takes whatever you've done below, merges it to the top, and that's an essential step. So, we need to do that, and then we'll go ahead and name this one Sharpen or Sparkle or something like that. Now next what we're going to do is we will apply a filter to this layer. So, let's zoom in real closer here so that we can start to focus in on these eyes, and I'll zoom in really close there. Next go to the filter pull-down menu, and choose other and then high pass. Again, so you merge the top, step one. Step two, filter, other, high-pass. Now in the high-pass style log, what we're going to do is we are going to bring up our radius, and we're really going to focus in on the details that we're seeing here in the eye. Now if you go too far, you'll start to see the photograph and colors come through, so what you want to do is bring it to a point where you're seeing really nice detail in this area of the image. If you're wondering what you should use for your own images, for this one it's about four pixels, well you have to keep in mind that it depends on the resolution of the file. Most importantly though, you want to go for something which looks like this. So, bring it up to about this value here. Then, next click OK. Now often when you're working with high-pass, the next step that you want to do is remove the color because if you look closely here, there are colors on this layer. So, we want to get rid of those. To do that, go to image adjustments, and then choose desaturate. So, step one, merge to top. Step two high-pass. Step three, image adjustments, desaturate. Alright, well now that we've done all that, the next thing that we are going to do is add a layer mask. So click on the add layer mask icon. Now the mask is currently white to revealing all of this. I don't want to sharpen everything. I only want to bring out detail here, because it's a certain kind of detail that we're going to bring out. So what we can do is go to the properties panel and click on the tab for masks and then click invert. Or you may remember there's a shortcut to invert. It's command I on a Mac or control I on Windows. That will also invert that mask. So either way, either by clicking on the button, or by using the shortcut, go ahead and invert that. Next, grab your brush tool. You want to paint with white so make sure we have white selected there. And we want to have a brush which has 0% hardness and a nice good size brush so we can paint inside this area. Opacity up to 100. Perfect. And when we paint this in, what we'll see is that it will come in as gray. Now that's because we haven't changed our blending mode yet. And sometimes if you're new to the technique, it's kind of of helpful to leave it like this so we can actually see, hey where am I painting? Here I'll tap the left bracket key so I can paint in this area up top. And so again we're just bringing this in and this is a nice way to be able to see which area of the image we've worked on. It's also helpful to see if you're working on your image and then all of a sudden make a mistake, like I've done up there, just tap the X key. That allows you to flip your foreground and background colors, so that flips those. What we should have is something kind of along the lines of this where we have this effect which we're bringing in to this area of the image. Now the effect is strange. It isn't finished, but we're getting there. The way that we'll finish this off is by trying one of three blending modes, soft light, overlay, or linear light. Soft light will give us the least amount of effect. You can see how it's just kind of subtly bringing out all of those little details. Next in the line, we have overlay. That's a little bit more intense. And last but not least, we have linear light. That's kind of the, ah! One where you can really see how it's bringing out those details. Now if we look at this a little bit pulled back you can see how the eyes just look so much more interesting because we can see all of these little details of the eyes in such wonderful ways. Now the trick is, of course, if you've worked on one eye, we need to work on the other one, right? So, over here, we'll use our brush, and we'll just paint this in. In this case we're painting the affect straight in. We've already done the blending mode, so we can just kind of see where it's coming in. So, you can do that as well. That's fine. But sometimes it's just helpful to have that little view when it's still gray in order to see what it looks like. And to get that view, you just go back to your normal blending mode. And that can just help to see if you've made a mistake, because sometimes it's hard to tell, did I actually do that or not? Oh yeah I did. The gray is the dead giveaway that my edges aren't very good or that I kind of didn't work very well on one certain area of that. So, anyway, then we go to that blending mode of our choice, the one which makes sense for the image. Anyway, this one, if I zoom out a little bit so you can see that in context, you can see hopefully how it's really bringing out some nice sparkle, nice details, to that area of the image. So, here's that before, and then now, the after. Alright, well now that we've added that to this photograph let's explore how we can brighten up the eyes and change the color. So, leave this file open. We'll continue to work on it, and we'll look at how we can brighten the eyes and improve the color in the next movie.

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