- There is a right way to retouch eye whites
and there is definitely a wrong way as well.
And I want to show you a little bit about
how to do it properly when it comes
to retouching eye whites.
So in order to clean up the eye whites,
what I'm going to do is create a new mask
and we are again, going to activate the brush tool.
For this I'd like to use a specific brush
that I've already saved,
it's called my eye whites max brush
and I will be giving this to you as well
to use on every image from now on
that you guys are working on.
So I've got my eye whites min, medium and eye whites max.
So I'm going to activate that brush,
you can see there are multiple changes
that I've applied to it.
We're going to go ahead and pull the flow
and the density all the way up.
We'll make our brush a little bit bigger.
Let's go ahead and zoom in to our eyes.
I'm going to hide this side panel.
And what I'll just do, is I'll just start painting
on the eye white areas.
And I'm not really worried about staying
within the lines and I'll tell you why.
So we're just going to go ahead and paint that effect.
You can see how all of a sudden the eye whites
are looking very nice, a little bit softer,
they're looking a little bit bluer, a little bit younger,
less veins, a tad bit of brightening, not too much.
So what I'd like to do now that I have this mask created,
you can see it was quite a sloppy mask.
If I hover over it, is I would like to add a constriction.
I would like for this only to be visible
over the brightest areas.
So we can do that by choosing our intersect option, right?
But if you hold down option or alt,
you can see that the intersect button magically appears.
So right here, why it's not there in the first place,
I am not sure, but we have our little secret way
of accessing our intersect.
And I would like to add a luminance range to this intersect.
And I want this to be visible only
over the bright tones of my image.
So go ahead and click there.
And you can see immediately on our range area
that this effect is going to be visible
from the brightest tonalities,
and then it's going to fade out
as the pixels get darker on the underlying image.
So that's important.
But if we go ahead and show that now,
you can see that, that mask instead
of being super sloppy, which was our original brushing
we added the constriction of the luminance
showing the brightest areas and we're left
with a really beautiful mask that's very well done.
And we were able to constrict it using the luminance range
and it allows us to create really nice masks
in a fraction of the time.
So I'll go ahead and show you the before
and the after of the right way to retouch eye whites, right?
We didn't go too far.
We didn't brighten it.
One thing that I see a lot is
I see radioactive eye whites.
When it comes to beginner retouchers
starting to retouch their images.
I'll just say, this is bad on so many ways, right?
First off, it's way too bright
and that's not going to look realistic at all.
But secondly, what you're doing by brightening
the corners of the eye white
is you're actually taking a spherical object
which is the eyeball
and you're making it look more flat.
So, if I were talking to somebody who's just starting out
you can brighten the eye whites
but just do it a little bit
don't do it too much.
And then the other tip that I have for you
is don't brighten.
I'm going to use the brush
to basically take away from this or erase it.
Don't brighten the corners as much.
When you leave the corners dark.
What it does is it retains the three dimensional feeling
and illusion of the eyeballs, okay?
So we're still brightening those eye whites
but we're just brightening them closest to the Iris
and not all the way out to the corners.
And that's going to help you keep your retouching
looking really nice and realistic.
And also just don't go too far with the brightening
because you don't really need to brighten the eyes
getting rid of the clarity and just brightening.
A tad bit is fine.
One thing that I do want to mention is as eye whites age
or as we age, our eye whites tend
to go from blue to yellow as we age.
So if you're looking for a subliminal way,
a realistic and natural way
to make the illusion of a younger face,
what you would do is you would actually change the color
of the eye whites instead
of actually brightening their tonality.
So a lot of it is just, you know
let's get back to our color theory.
Let's get back to the brass tacks.
How did we fix the under eyes?
We changed the color and the brightness.
How can we realistically make better eye whites?
You change the color.
You don't necessarily need to change the brightness.
So that's a little bit about what to do
and what not to do when it comes to eye whites.