Tutorial: How to ‘Make Eyes Look Amazing’ In Photoshop

One of our favorite Photoshop tutorial websites, Phlearn, yesterday put out a tutorial that is both incredibly useful and a bit scary. Useful because making eyes pop in post is probably one of the most sought after Photoshop skills. Scary because this kind of manipulation is a slippery slope that could lead to photographers getting lazy and using the “fix it in post” excuse… so proceed with caution.

In just over 11 minutes, Phlearn’s Aaron Nace will show you how to color, brighten and sharpen the windows of your subject’s soul in post so that you can take that portrait to the next level. Here’s the before and after screenshots that show how much of a difference Nace is able to make:

Obviously not everybody is going to want to go as far as he did, but both the results and the video demonstrate that Nace isn’t just haphazardly throwing copious amounts of color and brightness into these eyes. He takes careful stock of how the light comes in and reflects within the eyeball so that the final version turns out as natural looking as possible.

Would it be possible to capture eyes this bright and colorful in-camera? We’ll let the professional portraitists reading this tell us. If it is and you want to show people how to get these results without the Photoshop, write up/create a tutorial and send it our way! We’d love to share it with the readers. Until then, this might not be a bad tutorial to bookmark for future reference.

For more details, check out Phlearn’s own post about the video. And if you’d like to keep up with all of Phlearn’s tutorials, be sure to head over to their website or subscribe to their YouTube channel.

How To Color, Brighten and Sharpen Eyes in Photoshop [Phlearn]