Lessons

Lesson Info

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

There are many different tools that you can use to fix these eyes. You can use Curves adjustment layer, any adjustment layers basically you can use to fix up these areas. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and make a new adjustment layer and use a Curves adjustment layer 'cause I'm very comfortable with the Curves adjustment layer, but if you'd rather use something like Levels or even something like, I think those would probably be your two heavy hitters here, it'd be Levels or Curves. Brightness and Contrast can also do it as well. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the Curves adjustment layer here to brighten up the whole image just so I can see what I'm doing. So it's brightening up the whole image and I'm gonna do very similar to what I did in the last with the teeth. I started by brightening everything up or I started by fixing everything in those teeth and then I went into the mask, I inverted the mask and I painted it in exactly where I wanted those areas to be. So i...

f I click on this mask, I press Ctrl+I to invert it and now I use my brush tool with the color white. Now you can either make a selection for these eyes or if you're comfortable with it, just start brushing in with your brush and you see that I use the Curves adjustment layer to make that a little bit brighter. One thing that I wanna kinda shy away from, though, is taking this a little too far to the edge of the eyes or inside the pupil because those are areas that really draw a lot of character into the eyes, especially around the edge of the eyes, especially someone who has lighter colored eyes like myself or my wife or my sons because that adds a lot of character to the outside and allows you to just kinda fall in to that lighter color. If someone has really dark eyes, then I guess it really doesn't necessarily matter. You're probably not gonna see the differentiation between them. So just painting really lightly, again I started with a really heavy Curves adjustment layer and I'm slowly just kinda painting in on these eyes here. You get really uncomfortable with yourself when you see yourself like this. Them I'm gonna zoom out 'cause it might look unnatural, it might look fake, it might look a little bit creepy if you lighten them too much, if you do something like this then we look like we're something straight out of like a horror movie. Dun dun dun dun like I'm a vampire or something like that. So using the curve, why I like to use the curve on this instead of selecting those pixels and doing something to the pixel layer is that at anytime I can use this Curves adjustment layer to modify how I want that to look, I can make my eyes darker, I can make 'em brighter, or I can come in and make them a little darker in their dark areas and brighter in their bright areas and really start to shape how that color in that eye actually looks and how it naturally works. If I get a little too heavy-handed with this, even if I get heavy-handed right here, we can still do some things to make this blend in a little bit better, here we're just using a Curves adjustment layer, we haven't tapped into Blend modes, and we also haven't tapped into something like maybe Blend If, so that if quite possibly I bring that Curves adjustment layer up and there's some black that's happening inside these inside the eye somewhere and I wanna protect it, I can always make sure that's protected by going into Blend If. So if I come over here and double-click right here, Blend If, zoom in a little bit more on the eye there, bring this over, we start to see that some of that darker area stays if I press Alt or Option and split and feather that over, and bring it in look at that it's really starting to shape that eye so it's only allowing the Curves adjustment layer to really hit anything that's a mid-tone into a highlight of that eye and letting all the other colors just kinda fall into place so that they don't get blown out or or change or alter the color of those eyes, the way they naturally might be. It's just brightening them up a little bit, might darken them down a little bit like that. And that right there would be a little bit more of a natural look on the eyes. If it's too much, you have your blend modes and you also have opacity, if I changed it to something like soft light, it's gonna make the dark areas darker in those eyes, the light areas lighter in those eyes. If I change to something like overlay, we might get a little bit more saturation intensity along with that 'cause it's a boosting contrast. If I change it to color, it's only going to bring the color that I'm manipulating in this curve over onto those eyes. I'm gonna go and just set it to normal, they're still a little a little bit on the vampire side. If I drop the opacity down to something like 70%, 65%, 70%, something like that, maybe even 50%, that looks pretty good there, just lightens 'em up a little bit. Fit on screen, doesn't look unnatural. Maybe I could go a little bit less on those curve. Taper that down, again I'm just trying to stay I'm trying to keep the integrity of what my face looks like and just brighten things up to allow the viewer into those areas so it's not as dark as that those are a little dark, especially in those shadow areas. So I'm just gonna double-click this Curves adjustment layer and call it light lighten eyes. Now cleaning up the eyes, I did say that in when I was doing the presentation this one that I took the these um catch lights that I use it basically um it's not I think it's an octagon box that I was using for this 'cause you can kinda see the maybe it's a uh hexagon, six-sided shape, you can see the six-sided shape in those eyes. If I didn't want a six-sided shape in the eyes and I wanted a different catch light or maybe the catch lights just aren't looking that great and I want to make my own, what we can do is we can zoom into the eyes here and we make a new layer and we need to reconstruct the eye, totally reconstruct the eye to get rid of these so that I can use my own catch lights here. So what I would do in that case is I would probably take a Selection for those eyes. What I would probably do here is actually just do something like this, grab this, like that, oops, my last Selection had a feather on it so I'm gonna change that to zero. Make a Selection for this eye like this and I'll do the same thing over here, well I'll do that separately. So right now if I make a stamp of this, if I press Ctrl+Shift+Alt and E, it's gonna make a stamp of everything that's happening below here but restrict it within this selection. So I'll press Ctrl+Shift+Alt and E, Cmd+Shift+Option E on a Mac, oh actually it's just gonna go ahead and make the entire stamp, that's okay I can deal with that. What I need from this, what I really need from this is I need a stamp of all the stuff that's happening here, I need a stamped copy of all the stuff that's happening in that eye so I've got the stamp there, I'll just press Command or Ctrl+J to duplicate this and I'll call this right eye now because I still have that stamp there I can come over to this side, grab this eye right here like this, and make another duplicate copy from that stamp and call this left eye and then I can delete this stamp altogether, all I needed that stamp for was to just give me the pixel levels, pixel values for what these eyes are. So if I go to I'm gonna start with my right eye first if i go to my right eye and I press Command or Ctrl+T, I can rotate this and flip this pixel thing around. What I'm gonna use that for is to cover up that catch light so I'll right-click and say Flip Horizontal and then I'll just turn it til it fits over this eye. I'll right-click on here and say Flip Vertical too so you got a really nice selection for both sides, I'll zoom in definitely want this to look right okay? Eyes are one of those things that if they don't look perfect things are gonna look really funky. So I'll just I'll move this around like this, if we want to see if we're getting it right and getting it close to where we need it to be we can change this Blend mode to the difference blend mode. If I move this up, if I move this up and around you see where the pupil starts to line up right about there. It's lookin' pretty good, change this back to the regular blend mode and now I just need to mask it in. So I add a mask here why is it coming up black? That's interesting, ah. I made a selection there, Ctrl+D to clear the selection, I'm gonna make a mask, press B for my brush tool, and paint with black to get rid of this area here all the way around the eye, feather this around like that. Kay that's pretty good. And we do that over here too, there we go, yeah. It's pretty good, go over to this side, take our left eye, Command or Ctrl+T, right-click, flip horizontal, flip vertical, get this to fit, maybe I'll flip that back vertical, yeah that'll work, again eyes you gotta be you gotta make sure that there's a nice perfect circle in there, if it's like this, it's like what is going on? What are you on? So go ahead and press Enter on that and then I'll use my brush tool, I make a mask on it with my brush tool set to black, paint that out kay and I'll zoom out, look at that, that's weird. No catch lights in the eyes, catch lights actually are one of those things that's going to add character and life to the eyes. If there's no catch lights in them, you just look like a fake plastic doll, it's really really odd. Let's just look at this right eye for a second. If we look at the shape of this right eye, especially right of like shape and color I should say the color right here in this right eye and the color that's happening back here and then what I replaced it with, it's a little bit odd, isn't it? What can I do? I'll add a Curves adjustment layer above it with a clipping mask, Alt or Option to clip that in, I can darken that down a little bit. Right now I'm working on the left eye and darken that down a little bit to make it match that side. When I do that, I might see that my mask is not that great so I'll just go over to that left eye, paint in that area to get rid of any hard edges. All that curve did was just make that area darker to match that side. Come over to this side, look at this right eye, it's really trippy 'cause I was actually on my right eye, I got it backwards, right eye, left eye, stage right, stage left, ah it's all confusing. So we'll go ahead and press the Curves adjustment layer on this one, Alt or Option to clip this in because this curve, we only want it to affect that eye. Make it a little bit darker, there we go that blends in really nice and we'll just click on the mask, we don't wanna click on the mask of this clipping mask 'cause what have we always said about the clipping mask? The clipping mask is a thief for anything that's going on below it so I don't need to mask right here, I just need to mask right here. If I were to try and get rid of this hard edge on this clipping mask, it won't do anything. I gotta get rid of that mask on the right eye. So I'll just paint in there, get rid of that edge, feather that in a little bit more, there we go. All that work to reconstruct the eye so that we can add our own catch lights. But what we can do here is just to keep ourselves in line here, these are all eye layers, and you notice how this is getting pretty thick now, this is four layers just on these two little portions of those eyes so what I can do is I can grab the left eye bottom layer here, press and hold Shift on the top Curves adjustment layer, press Command or Ctrl+G and put them in a group and call this new eyes. So all of them are contained within that one grouping. And now what I need to do is make my own shape, whatever shape I want that to be to be the catch lights within those eyes. We wanna be careful, though, that we don't make two different shapes cause then it's gonna look really funky but if what we noticed before is if we look at these the catch lights here in these eyes if I zoom in here, this one is a whole hexagon, this one is just like a half of one so we have to keep that in mind on how the catch light's gonna look when we rebuild our new catch light. Let's say I want this to look like more like a strip bank so I want like a four foot strip bank type of light instead of an octagon box 'cause I think those are a little bit more handsome on the eyes, I need to make a shape that is gonna have kinda like a rounded type of rectangle look to it and I can just do that by hand by making a selection. I'll make a new layer, let's turn our, let's leave that leave that grouping off as we make this, well keep the group on, we'll make a new layer, I'll grab my gonna use the polygonal lasso tool or I can use the regular lasso tool, let's use the regular lasso tool and I'm just gonna freehand a strip bank. Now what I need to do for this is I need to fill this in with white, so press Shift+F5, fill it in with white, now by itself, yeah it's a catch light but it's pretty darn potent right? It's not quite what we want. So put left catch um what we can do with this is if we press Ctrl and click on this that'll make a selection for this and then I can make uh a mask on here and after I make that mask, that's a mask that is basically surrounding this selection, I can come over to the feather and I can just start feathering this over and that'll help make it a more natural look. If we look at the catch lights before, though, they do have hard edges, they have hard kinda pixelated edges so we're trying to mimic the exact same thing. So I'll turn that back on, maybe drop the opacity of this a little bit, press Command or Ctrl+T and rotate that and if there's a little bit too much on that catch, just press my brush and then I can brush in or brush out I should say with black any of those areas that are just too much like right there. Notice how it's still maintaining that feather because of the uh feather that we have on the mask. So I'll zoom out and I need to do the same thing on the other side so all I have to do, press Command or Ctrl+J to duplicate that catch light, press V for the move tool and move this over to this eye. Now things are gonna look a little funky, I know it's okay, I'll move this down, press the nudge keys or the arrow keys, if I press the left or right arrow keys or up or down it's gonna nudge that around. Turn this off to see if I've got it just about where I want it, yeah it looks pretty good. But what I might need to do here is get my lasso and just shave the top of this off. Just select it, once it's selected I can paint within a selection so I'm basically protecting the rest of that area and just painting within that selection to paint that area off, might make this a little bit smaller and just freehand some of this a little bit more. And you can play around with different shapes, you can play around with different catch lights, different catch light shapes, and see if you like that catch light better than we had before. It's just slightly different, it's just a little bit less intrusive. What I didn't like about this catch light here is it's almost the same size as my pupil so it's like you know it's just a little bit too big if I add my own catch light there I can make it a little bit slimmer and a little bit more thinner.