How to lighten the color of eyes in a digital photograph using Photoshop

In a few simple steps, and using one tool, you can lighten (or darken) the color of the eyes of any digital photograph. Even if you are not very familiar with Photoshop, you will be able to follow this tutorial and lighten (or darken) like a pro!

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• A digital image, preferably a color photo, though you can use a black and white.
• Photoshop.

1. Open the picture that you are going to work on in Photoshop. Make sure that you have your docked windows opened as well (such as layers, history, color, navigator/levels, and the tool pallet). My workspace arrangement can be seen to the left.
2. Zoom into the eye that you will work on first. You want the eye to fill the viewable screen, if possible. Select the Dodge tool and set the Opacity level to about 75 if you want a lot of lightening of the eye, or about 45 if you want a little lightening of the eye. See the picture to the left for the tool, and the area that we are going to work on first.
3. While zoomed into the eye, and having selected the dodge tool and the correct amount of opacity for it, we are going to slowly trace just the iris of the eye. Make sure that your brush is only as wide as the iris, itself. Use [on the keyboard to make the dodge brush smaller, or ] on the keyboard to make the dodge brush larger. Be careful to not touch into the pupil (black area inside of the colored part of the eye) or the lids of the eye.
4. Zoom back out of the eye to normal size. If you made a mistake, you can go back in your history and undo it and try again. If you notice that you missed an area, you can decrease the size of your brush and zoom back in to touch them up.
5. You can make the eyes darker than the original color by using the burn tool rather than the dodge tool. On the picture to the left, you can see that I took my natural green eye on the right and darkened it on the left. All of the steps are the same, but the tool is different.
6. That's it! As you can see from the picture on the left (click on it to make it larger), the outside eyes of both subjects are the original color, and the inside eyes are lightened.

Tips & Warnings

• This touchup can be done in as little as 2 minutes once you get used to it.
• Play with the brush size to make sure you have it as close as you can to the size of the iris. The closer the size, the less you'll have to go back and touch up the color.
• Go slow. This is an easy touchup to a photograph, but if you go too fast, you will have to redo steps many times.
• Make sure you make a copy of the picture before you start altering it. You'll be glad you did if you make a big mistake and need to go back to the start!