How-To

GroovyPost Teaches Photoshop: Basic Photo Touch-Up Techniques – Eyes

By Stefan

Last Updated on October 28, 2021

I’m going to show you how you can easily do things like changing the eye color in a photo.

Ready for another groovyPost in the Adobe Photoshop Basics series? Excellent!  Today I’m going to show you how you can easily do things like changing the eye color in a photo or adding some spooky effects like replacing an eye with an image.  With Photoshop, the How-To is quick and simple so let’s get started.

You Will Need:

1. Photoshop CS4/CS5
2. A Photo of an eye/eyes (either taken by you or downloaded from the internet)
3. 30 minutes of free time.

Eye Touch-Up Techniques

Changing Eye Color

Begin with an image of any eye, preferably a high quality .jpg

Use the Selection tool of your choice to select any reflection areas in the eye and then copy them to a new photoshop Layer, placed on top of the current one.

Go back to your eye layer and precisely select the eye. You can use the Refine Edge dialog box to smooth out your selection and achieve a more realistic effect in the end.

Now use a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer to change the color of the eye. You can tick the Colorize checkbox on the adjustment layer options for a more solid color effect. Be sure your reflection layer is still on top of all the others, or things won’t look right.

Wasn’t that simple?  If you remember, we did something very similar in a previous How-To where we used the Hue/Saturation Adjustment feature in Photoshop to change the color of a car.  It’s super potent yet straightforward once you get the hang of it.

Adding an Image To The Eye

Here’s where things get a bit more complicated. If you can, find or make an image of an eyeshot with no angle IE: looking directly at the camera; otherwise, this trick will cause a lot of distortion to your image, which you will need to try and fix.

To start, begin with selecting the eye directly.

Now use a Brush, an Adjustment Layer, and the Smudge Tool to make yourself an effect similar to the image below. The point of this is to have a near-solid color effect as close as possible to the colors in the picture, which you will be adding to your eye.

Now you can add your image. Make sure it fits into the area of the eye. Again, use the Refine Edge dialog box if you need to make things look smoother. You can also try changing the blending mode to Overlay, Color, Pin Light, or any other overlay mode that looks good with your image.

Additional groovyTips

You can pick up a brush and do additional black strokes around the eyelashes for a profound eye shadow effect. Also, try gently touching some corner areas of the eye with the Sharpen Tool to boost the overall pop.

While you’re at it, add a Filter for more of an artistic look…

…and play around with a Low Flow White Overlay Brush to make things look perfect and beyond.

In today’s groovyPost on photoshop basics, I showed you how-to:

1. Change the color of an eye
2. Replace an eye with a personal image or logo
3. Touch-up an eye with dark eyelashes and use a filter to add a little freaky to your image

So give one or all of these Photoshop tips & tricks a try and drop us a comment if you need any help along the way or if you have your own groovyTip!