Eye Brightening Technique

I’m excited to introduce you to Terri French (and her beautiful grandchildren). I met Terri through an online Photo Gallery and have thoroughly enjoyed viewing her work. I’m very grateful she is sharing some of her secrets with us. After reading this article, you may want to visit Terri French Photography to see her fantastic work. Enjoy!


My name is Terri French. I live in southeastern Idaho, only two hours away from both Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. My husband and I love to get out and hike, therefore landscape photography is a love of mine. I also have six young grandchildren who live in my town. I get to see them often. As you can imagine, taking photos of them has been a real treat for me as well. I am not a professional photographer, but consider myself an advanced amateur. I have had people ask me to do work for them professionally, but I enjoy this as a hobby so much, I don’t want to ruin that by turning it into a job. I have studio lights and a few backdrops. Once in a while we get out all the equipment and do formal shoots of the kids. But, usually I take natural light photographs of them. It is much easier and the kids seem to cooperate better without all the fuss of all the equipment.

Occasionally I use a flash either on my camera, bounced off of the walls or ceiling, or off the camera through an umbrella. But, if there is enough light, I certainly favor natural light. Putting the child near a window often gives me enough light indoors. Outdoors, I try to find a shady location. Last week my daughters and I took all six of the kids to a shady location near an old warehouse. I used my Nikon gear to take the photos. I used my D300 camera and my 17-55 f2.8 lens. I love to use fast glass wide open for natural light photography. The 17-55 f2.8 lens is an expensive lens, but the inexpensive Nikkor 50 f1.8 lens is an excellent choice for taking portraits of children. Pair that with an entry level Nikon DSLR and you could have a nice portrait kit for under $1000. (Other brands have similar setups. I’m a Nikon shooter, so that is what I am familiar with.)

The one problem with natural light photographs is that the eyes are often dark and a bit dull. A little bit of post processing can do so much to make an ordinary photo into something special. Using Eye Pop techniques in post processing seems to be an especially popular technique on children’s photos right now. I always shoot in RAW and convert my RAW photos in Adobe Lightroom 2. RAW conversion could be the topic of many tutorials. I will leave that for another time. Today I would like to show you how I enhance the eyes in Photoshop. Below is a photo of my grandson that we took outside at the warehouse. It has had the raw conversion done, but the eyes are still very dull to me.

I open the photo in Adobe Photoshop. (I’m using CS4, but older versions of the software will work just fine for this simple technique.)

Step 1 Type CTRL + J (I’m using a PC, adjust the keystrokes accordingly for a MAC.) This duplicates the photo on a new layer.

Step 2 Go to the blending mode dropdown box and choose “screen”. You will notice that the photo has become a lot lighter.
 

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 3 Hold down the ALT key and click on the Add Layer Mask button. This adds a black layer mask onto layer one. You will notice that the photo has turned dark again. This mask is hiding everything on the layer.

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 4 Click on the black layer mask icon on Layer 1 This will enable you to paint onto the layer mask. We will paint with white onto the mask. When working with masks remember that black hides and white reveals. So, our purpose here is to reveal the bright eyes in Layer 1 that are hidden by the new black mask that we just added.

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 5 Choose a soft paintbrush that is smaller than the eyes. You want the brush to be at 100% opacity. Make sure that the foreground color is set to white. Zoom in on the eyes. Then paint over the eyes with the white brush. They will look really strange–way too light. We’ll fix that in the next step.
 

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 6 Zoom back out and lower the opacity of layer one until the eyes look brighter than the original, but more natural.
  

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 7 Add a level adjustment layer. There are several different ways to do this depending on the version of Photoshop that you are using. One way is to go to the menu bar and choose Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Levels.

Step 8 Zoom in to the eyes. We are going to adjust the levels until the pupils of the eye have more contrast and pop. This will effect the entire photo for now, but only look at the pupils. We will mask out everything else later. Click on the black layer mask icon and then hit CTRL + I. This will fill the mask with black.

(Click image to see larger version)

Step 9 Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6 using the mask on the levels layer instead of Layer 1. Paint only on the pupils of the eye instead of the entire eye

(Click image to see larger version)

Now you can finished post processing the photo with any other steps you like to take. I like to bump up the contrast and saturation a bit, clean up the skin, and add a vignette around the edges. I flatten the image when I am finished working on it because all these duplicated layers really increase the file size. Then I save a copy and keep the original unedited. Below is my finished photo.

A few more examples of natural light photos with the eyes brightened. Remember the intensity of the effect can all be adjusted in the opacity of each layer. How much to enhance the eyes is a matter of personal taste and you can do as much or as little as pleases you with the simple opacity adjustment.

Terri French is an advanced amateur photographer living with her husband in southeastern Idaho. She enjoys hiking, landscape photography, and her grandchildren who all live nearby.

To see Terri’s gallery visit Terri French Photography

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