Making Eyes Sparkle


This is another one of those "30-second miracles" for brightening eyes, enhancing the catch lights, and generally drawing attention to the eyes by making them look sharp and crisp (crisp in the "sharp and clean" sense, not crisp in the "I burned my retina while looking at the sun" kind of crisp).

Step One

Open the photo you want to retouch. Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Unsharp Mask. When the Unsharp Mask dialog appears, enter your settings (if you need some settings, check out Chapter 13); then click OK to sharpen the entire photo.

Step Two

After you've applied the Unsharp Mask filter, apply it again using the same settings by pressing Command-F (PC: Control-F), and keep applying it using the same keyboard shortcut until the eyes stand out (here I applied it four times). Although the eyes probably look nice and crisp at this point, the rest of the person is severely oversharpened, and you'll probably see lots of noise and other unpleasant artifacts, but we'll fix that in the next step.

Step Three

Go under the Window menu and choose History to bring up the History palette. This palette keeps track of your last 20 steps, and you'll see the five steps you've done thus far listed in the palette (an Open step, followed by your Unsharp Mask steps. By the way, these steps are actually called "History States"). Click on the Open State to return your photo to how it looked before you applied the Unsharp Mask filter.

Step Four

In the History palette, click once in the first column beside the bottom Unsharp Mask State. Press Y to switch to the History Brush, and in the Options Bar, click on the Brush thumbnail to choose a soft-edged brush (about the size of the iris) from the Brush Picker. Click once right over the iris, and it will paint in the crisp, sharpened eye, leaving the rest of the face untouched. It does this because you clicked in that first column in the History palette, which tells Photoshop to "paint from what the photo looked like at this point." Pretty cool!

Before

After (with eyes that sparkle)



    The Photoshop CS2 Book(c) for Digital Photographers
    The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter)
    ISBN: B002DMJUBS
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2006
    Pages: 187
    Authors: Scott Kelby

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