Photoshop changing eye color

Ever wondered how people use photoshop to change someone’s eye color? People which naturally are brown suddenly showing up in a perfect shade of blue on posters, websites, magazines, etcetera? It’s a lot easier than you might expect and after reading this tutorial you will be able to do it too. First of all let’s have [...]

Ever wondered how people use photoshop to change someone’s eye color? People which naturally are brown suddenly showing up in a perfect shade of blue on posters, websites, magazines, etcetera? It’s a lot easier than you might expect and after reading this tutorial you will be able to do it too.

First of all let’s have a look at what we’re going to create, on the left side you can see the improved eye while on the right side of the picture one of the natural eyes of this woman can be found.

After you have found a good picture to work with it’s time to get started, if you’re not sure on where to find an image just use Google image search and search for something like portrait or face. Open it up in photoshop and we’ll get started.

Where to begin

First of all you’ll want to create a new layer, in order to do this quickly you can press ctrl+shift+n (layer > new >layer… in case the shortcut doesn’t work).

Now there are a couple of techniques you could use, we will be handling the so called quick mask tool here. It’s an easy and quick way to get basically any selection you want and in my opinion gives a more natural selection due to the roundness of the brushes than in example the pen tool, drawing a circular selection is something used frequently as well but as you might notice in this picture in example one of the eyes isn’t completely round.

Quick masking our way through

Zoom in onto the eye you want to work with first, easiest is to have a full view on the eye so you can make the best selection. Now it’s time to start using the quick mask tool, easiest way to do so is press Q, if that doesn’t work don’t be afraid you can find the button in the image on the right, look at it in the lower part of your left toolbar.

Now select a brush and adjust its size, as you start coloring in the eye you should be seeing it turning up red if you went into the quick mask successfully. In case it doesn’t turn red you might want to check the title bar of the image and see if it says Quick Mask there or not, in case it doesn’t you are not in quick mask mode.

On the left you can see what it’s supposed to look like now, don’t worry if you went a bit over the edge of the eye since you can always fix that later if needed.

Let’s exit quick mask mode again, just press Q or select the icon again should do the trick. Currently it looks like you’re selecting the eye but don’t let yourself be fooled, you’re actually selecting everything except the eye, luckily enough this is easy to fix with photoshop with invert which you can do by simply pressing shift+ctrl+i (select>inverse).

Bringing in some color

Make sure you’ve selected the new layer, now select the paint bucked tool and find a nice color to use. Be sure not to do it too bright, best is to select it a bit in the range between too dark and too light. The color you use doesn’t really matter although of course if you want to go for a natural look you should go for the colors like blue or brown.

Fill in your selection, it might look weird for a bit as it’s a solid color but after we alter the blending mode and set it to soft light it suddenly blends in a lot better. You might want to alter the opacity a bit as well to make your fill color less bright and somewhat blend better together with the natural eye.

Fixing the artifacts

The eye color has been altered a bit as you can see but it still has some imperfections like the yellow circle which you can find around the pupil, this is something which many people have and is quite natural but when it comes to creating eyes for posters or magazine covers it is commonly chosen to go for what is considered as perfect rather than natural.

In order to get rid of that imperfection you could desaturate the entire face which would leave you with a colored eye on a black and white image but you can also pick to only desaturate the eye. In order to do this select the layer of the face and now while having ctrl pressed (I am not sure what this is on the mac) click on the preview image of the layer of the eye. If all went well you should see the selection of the eye show up on your image.

The last thing we’ll have to do now is desaturate this selection which can be done by pressing shift+ctrl+u (image>adjustments>desaturate).

Finishing up

Finally repeat the same thing on another layer for the other eye and you’re set, you should have created yourself some nicely alternative eyes. The best thing of all is that you can use this technique on any image, it doesn’t matter whether it is even a human to which you’re applying it or not.

I hope this tutorial was well to understand, I tried to explain it as easily as possible so everybody could understand it. If you have any remarks or just want to let me know how it went feel free to drop a comment, I love to get your feedback.