Tips & Tricks: Decal Eyes Light Adjustment

Today I wanted to share with you the results of an experiment I had been working on. I was getting a little tired of wasting good photos with good lighting and posing only to upload them to my photo editor and find that the Azone girls had strange looking eyes because of the way the light hit them. This lead to my little experiment. Keep in mind that there are probably other ways to do this but I've simply outlined here how I fix those pesky eyes. And always remember, experiment and adjust because the same number of steps don't always work for every single photo.

I will be using an older version of Photoshop. If you have the newest version, I am sure the tools are there somewhere, I just can't tell you where to find them as I don't have the latest version. Most photo editing programs should have similar tools for you to use.

The first thing you want to do is find your photo and open it in your photo editing program.

Once you have done this, duplicate the original layer. For this tutorial we will be working on our duplicate layer. (In photoshop you can do this by right-clicking on the 'background' layer and selecting duplicate).

The red arrow points to the problem eye.

The two tools we will be using are the Dodge (looks like a lollipop) and the Burn (looks like a closed hand picking up something). You will find these tools in the above picture with a red tick beside them.

We're going to start with the Burn tool. Use a soft round brush (with whatever diameter you like), have your Range as Midtones (although you can experiment with the other ranges) and your Exposure set to 50% (this can be lower or higher depending on your preference.)

What the Burn tool does is darken lighter areas but be careful and continually zoom in and out of your photo to see the overall effect. This is really a trial and error action. You can always delete or undo previous steps.

In this step, I've used the Burn tool around the eyes, in the black areas and also in the blue areas to darken the colour. However, the eye colour is a slightly different shade now.

I now use the Dodge tool (which lightens dark areas and makes light areas lighter) using a soft round brush again with Midtones range and 50% Exposure. Just like the Burn tool, experiment with the settings.

I use Dodge on the blue parts of the eyes to lighten them again and get as close to the other eye colour as I can. After doing this, I am still not happy with the results. However in some cases where the light isn't too bad, these actions can be enough to fix the problem. For this one, I am going to do a few extra steps.

I create a New Layer on top of the other two layers and use the Eyedropper tool to pick up the colour from the "good" eye.

With a soft round brush at 100% opacity, I carefully paint in the blue colour on the bad eye.

Once I am done, I set the mode to Hard Light at 45% and Fill colour to 65%. This part is really all about experimenting. You can use the Overlay mode instead but play around with the Fill and Opacity until you get something you're happy with.

It's almost there but not quite. I use Dodge tool again on the area I've just painted and go over it once and then I use the Dodge tool on the "good" eye and go over it once to give that shine. However, I wasn't happy with the white areas on the "bad" eye so I use the Eyedropper tool again to pick up the white from the "good" eye. Unfortunately, it had a greyish cast to it which I didn't like so I manually changed the foreground colour to White and using a soft round brush carefully painted in the whites on both eyes on a New Layer above all other layers. I have this set to Normal mode at 100% Fill and Opacity (although you could experiment with those).

I also went in with the Burn tool on the "good" eye to balance out the darker areas on both eyes.

And we're done.

Another example from the Halloween meet that I had to adjust.

Obviously if the lighting on the decal eyes are really bad, there's not a lot that can be done other than to take the photo again.

Hope the tips here can help someone.