Bright Eyes

nala · Oct 2, 2009

I love portraits where the subject's eyes really stand out - they look bright and almost sparkly. How do they do this? Are there camera settings and technique to accomplish this or is it mostly done in photoshop?

Thanks!!

tirediron · Oct 3, 2009

Some can be done in post-processing (Photoshop) but the real secerts to good eyes are (1) Focus; ensure that you focus on the eyes, and that you have sufficient DoF to ensure that the area of both eyes is tack sharp and (2) Lighting; use off-camera lighting, fill light and reflectors to eliminate dark shadows and provide the right catchlights.

Canosonic · Oct 3, 2009

TiCoyote · Oct 3, 2009

Really warm lighting will help. Try early morning sun, evening sun, or halogen lighting. Halogen pinspots, like they use in a jewelry store would be great, but if you pull out your DSLR in a jewelry store, they'll probably think you're fixing to rob the place. :lol:

nala · Oct 3, 2009

Thanks for the tips, everyone! I will work on the lighting and maybe even give HDR a shot. I have a lot of practicing to do, I just needed someone to point me in the right direction!

ddeerreekk · Oct 3, 2009

There's ways to do this with lighting, but honestly the easiest and most effective way (that I've done it at least - there's obviously multiple ways of achieving this) is to just do some burning and dodging in photoshop. If you don't have photoshop I'm sure you can look up comparable ways for whatever program you have. Basically just lightening the midtones and highlights and darkening the shadows a tad.

Here's an example where I've done this:

Obviously you can do this to varying degrees for the effect you want.

EDIT: I should add that in order for this to be effective, you need a decent picture to start with. Off camera lighting (as mentioned above) will help with this tremendously.

burstintoflame81 · Oct 4, 2009

Can't you use Curves in photoshop to bring out the eyes more? I am new to photoshop but have read some stuff about that in terms of color tweaking. So far, I find the easiest technique ( and most useful across the board, not just with eyes and portraits ) is learning to dodge and burn.

You can non-destructively Dodge and Burn in photoshop by doing the following. Open two new layers, name one BURN and one DODGE, set them both to gray-overlay. Use a brush with the hardness turned down so that you can make very gradual changes. ( this will also make it less noticeable if you occasionally are off target with a few moves of the mouse ) Use Black brush on DODGE to darken things and use White brush on BURN to lighten things. You can also raise or lower the transparency of each layer to fine tune the effect as well. I am sure that other seasoned PS users can add to this, but as a newb, I can tell you that its fairly easy to get the hang of.