Enhance your Eyes.

Just popping in with a quick and easy editing blog that focuses in on making the eyes in a photo stand out. The key to getting your eyes to pop is having a tool that allows you to make adjustments to ONLY the eyes, instead of brightening or sharpening the entire image we want to be able to do this to just the color in your eyes. Explore a wide variety of apps, this is much easier on a platform like Lightroom (what I use) or Photoshop but I can promise you.. There's an app for that! There's an app for everything!

This is the image we started with:

As usual, start with the exposure (brightness) of your photo. Having a bold bright photo will make your page stand out much more than if you have under exposed or dull images. If you feel like it is almost too bright, that's where you should be! Knowing the difference between bold and bright and over exposed, making you look washed out, is key.

Making your photo look professional without needing the help of an actual professional is always an added benefit. In order to accomplished the professional "airbrushed" look you want to bump up the sharpness of the photo, this is where you draw out every line and detail in a photo. Sharpening a photo that is taken with a phone can do WONDERS for the quality. But be sure to use your sharpening tool with caution, oversharpening will make your photo look "noisy" where the photo gets fuzzy creating the opposite of what you wanted in the first place. For every little bit you sharpen, use the softening tool about half as much.

(Image after sharpening 100% and softening 50%)

Now the fun part, adding color to the eyes! We are not changing the color in the eyes, we are bringing out colors that are already present but the camera did not have the ability to capture. THIS is what makes paying for photos so very expensive. Getting our eyes to pop is one of the things that we can do to make a portrait worth so much more money. Start by evening out the light in both eyes, Carters right eye is much darker than the left based on his position from the light source (the sun through the window), so I selected that eye and added some exposure.

After you feel that both eyes look the same in brightness select both eyes and bump up the saturation by a bit, adding too much saturation can make them look unnatural. We want big, bold, wow factor eyes but want to avoid them looking fake and having that take away from the photo itself. Keep them as natural as possible.

(the purple is not the saturation, it is to show you the part of the eye that we selected)

This is then the finished product! A good picture made fantastic that took less than thirty seconds of my time. Small details can make a big difference!

-T