Sharpen Eyes in Photoshop Tutorial {Adobe Photoshop}

I learned this cool tutorial recently from a friend photographer and wanted to share it with you. I have a few people asking me to teach them Photoshop so here is real quick and easy tutorial  for sharpening eyes. I was planning on teaching an editing class in my home on Photoshop after I get better.  In the meantime I thought I could just post a few tutorials on my blog for all those who would like to learn a few tips. Here are the steps are screenshots of my workflow. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions, I will do my best to get back to you when I can to answer any questions you may have about this. These were photos taken in my studio in Gilbert, AZ.

Listen this tutorial is very simple and you can learn it fast. Just do it a couple times and you will have it down pat.

Feel free to leave  me a comment if this has helped you or you have learned something from it. I love hearing comments!

I went to college for a Bachelor’s in Computer Animation at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, PA and The Art Institute of Los Angeles, CA. I had one quarter left to get my BA after 4 years but got asked to work on a feature film The Polar Express doing Motion Capture. From there my career in movies began. My background is in Visual Effects for movies. So I learned a ton of Photoshop and 3D programs. I will try and teach some of my work flow through my blog so that people all over the world can learn instead of just in Arizona.

The following  tutorial is from Adobe Photoshop cs3 version 10

1. zoom into the person’s eyes

2. drag the background layer and duplicate it (drag background to the button create new layer button, left of the garbage can)

3. select the LASSO TOOL (3rd tool from the top, on the left hand side)

4. draw a circle around the color part of the eye with the LASSO TOOL

5. Right click and FEATHER 5-10 pixels is good

6. Go to the SELECT at the top of the screen then select INVERSE, then hold CRTL and X (which deletes everything from the second layer so only the eye is left) OR EDIT, then CUT.

This leaves only the eye left. This is just an example of how it might look if you accidentally pick more than just the eyeball color.

7. Pick the ERASER tool and erase anything around the eye so you only leave the color of the eyeball. Make sure there is no white of the eyeball or skin left.

12. go to FILTER then SHARPEN, then UNSHARP MASK

Repeat and do the same steps for the next eye. The finished product is below

The photo finished is at below. Keep your eyes open for the next upcoming tutorial maybe tomorrow!!

I won’t normally sharpen an eye unless it’s a picture that is up close this one is too far away for anyone to really be able to see the difference.

Here is one more example of how nice the eyes look when finished.

the one all the way at the end on the right is the original, middle one is a little sharpened which is my favorite and 1st one is very sharpened a ton just to show you how sharp it does make it. Mind you that it does darken the color so doing it a little bit is better.

A friend just told me this

You can actually do the same as on that tutorial using LR (Lightroom) too… In the upper right corner in LR in Develop mode you see what is called “adjustment brush”. If you click on that, it brings up a palette under it where you can select sharpness, exposure, just about everything, and brush it into areas you need to–in LR I recommend you do this on a virtual copy so you can delete it if you don’t like it–just like a layer delete in PS. To create a virtual copy of a picture, right click on the picture and from the menu select “create virtual copy” which is not a file until you export it so it takes up no room on your computer.