Ever wondered why eyes in your photos don’t pop as much or seen images with stunning eyes that are crisp get and vibrant? There is a few little tricks to this and I will show you how.
First Steps
First and foremost it always helps to make sure the image you are trying to achieve this look is set up for success. This means evenly exposed with your subject facing the direction on the light.
Create a brush.
Lightroom 4 released brush presets. This comes in handy to save your own settings. If you are not confident it comes in handy that Lightroom has an iris enhance brush preset ready for you to use, or you can go ahead and tweak it or make your own brush to further manage specific details.
once you have selected a new brush you can press the ‘o’ key to highlight the areas that you pain in red. This is helpful to see if you have crossed the boundaries on the eye.
Adjust Exposure
The first thing I like to do is adjust the entire/part of the eye’s exposure to make sure the overall eye is adequately bright. Be careful not to over do this. Subtle is key for a natural look.
Brighten whites
using the white adjustment slider. I like to increase the whites slightly to make the appear more vibrant. Again do not over do this, the more you push the more cinematic you go or worse make the entire image look fake and distorted.
The Iris.
Select a new brush and paint over the iris. Increase the exposure only slightly, increase contrast, vibrance and clarity. I also adjust the temperature to help correct the natural colour of the eyes. If the eye is blue, I move the slider slightly towards blue to help correct blue tones. Be careful not to over do this, too much colour correction or vibrance will enhance the colour too much and give it a over done fake appearance.
Sharpen
Select a new brush and paint over the eye lashes, and iris. How much you sharpen will vary from image to image but it is hard to over do it. anywhere from a 25-75 percent increase is fairly normal.
By now your eyes should be popping and looking great!.
Ready to make the switch to manual mode?
