Mbdisign.nl Forums

Welcome once more to a new tutorial. In this tutorial we will enhance the irises of a person’s eyes. As my base picture I have chosen this picture, a cut-out of a set of a female’s eyes:



The first thing we are going to do is create a new layer by pressing Shift+Ctrl+N or by going to Layer--> New --> Layer. When you have created a new layer select your paintbrush, set white as your foreground color and choose a suitable brush size, depending upon your picture. Make sure you have selected the new, empty layer to work on, and start painting over the irises of the person’s eyes. You should get something which looks like this:



Hmm, that doesn’t look too pretty yet, does it? Go to Filter --> Blur--> Gaussian Blur and use a radius of approximately 3,5 pixels. Depending upon your picture it might look better if you use a larger or a smaller radius, so you should experiment with that a little. Your result will look something like this:



Open the layers window by pressing F7 if it isn’t open yet, and change the Blending Mode of the layer with the white on it to either Overlay or to Soft Light, depending upon the effect you want.
If you choose Soft Light as your Blending Mode you will get something like this:



If you choose Overlay as your Blending Mode you will get something like this:



If you want to, you are finished now. However, if you want to you can enhance the eyes some more. In some cases this might not look very natural, but that is fine if you’re doing a fantasy photomanipulation.
In your layers screen select the bottom layer and then take out your sponge tool. Make sure that it is set to “Saturate” and then go over the irises. Make sure that you don’t let go of the left mouse button while doing one iris, as otherwise you will get an over-saturated effect.

If you choose Soft Light as your Blending Mode you will get something like this:



If you choose Overlay as your Blending Mode you will get something like this:




Decide for yourself which effect you like the best; as usual this depends upon your picture as well. If you want to you can change the levels, hue, saturation, contrast and brightness, which could give you some surprisingly nice results.

Also, you could combine this tutorial with our recoloring tutorial, which can be found in our tutorial section as well:
http://www.mbdisign.nl/forum/about389.html

I have used the technique described there and I have given her blue eyes, resulting in this picture:



The pupils of the eyes look a bit too... dazed, a bit too light. Therefor I used the first method from the "Remove those red eyes!" tutorial, "Paint it black". This tutorial can be found here:
http://www.mbdisign.nl/forum/about363.html

If you do this you will get this as your result:



Then, simply to make the whole picture look better, go to Layer--> New Adjustment Layer--> Gradient Map. Then chose a Gradient which goes from Black to White and then click "Ok" and press F7 to go to the Layers screen. Select the Gradient Map layer and change the blending mode to "Soft Light". Play with the opacity of the layer a bit untill you have found the best result. In this case I put the opacity at 80% and I got this result, which is our final result:



If you have any questions about this tutorial, simply send me a PM or post a message on the forum.

Woah! Way awesome
Definitely ended up looking good. Pretty blue colours....