Exercise 20: Improvement or interpretation?

This exercise is to show how you can alter an image with the object to improve it or even make it totally different from the original one.  The image in question is one where I can enhance the eyes of a person to make them stand out.  As the eyes are ‘a window to the soul’ this could be quite an emotive subject.  It’s not known who wrote the words but according to Google it may have been written by an Arab of ancient times or from the Old Testament version of the bible. But, no one really knows.  Of course, the meaning of the words is that by looking into the eyes of a person one can see their hidden emotions and attitudes and thoughts.

I started this exercise by working on one eye at a time. I used my faithful book ‘How to cheat in Photoshop’ using the exercise which illustrates this feature.  As I mentioned in my Exhibitions & Reviews blog, there is a later version of this book, but this suits me just fine.

The object of this exercise was to select an area of a person and ‘improve’ it!  As the exercise itself states in the old days of ‘wet film’ and ‘dodging and burning ‘ it was thought of as quite legitimate.  The exercise asks what limits I would accept as a legitimate adjustment.  If I was taking pictures for a person who asked for some adjustment as they felt their pictures could be improved then I would do minor work. If it was for a well-known, local or national figure, and I was working for myself then I would have to give it serious consideration as to how much change my conscience would allow.  Minor items such as spots, scars and blemishes would be acceptable, but as I wrote in my Reviews blog, major changes would not be acceptable.


Refining exercise

Original image

The subject I chose was a young girl who wanted a photo book to get into modelling.  I felt that her eyes in the picture she had chosen to email to the major agencies could do with a bit of help.

I started with her right eye as it was a bit red around the edges and used the elliptical lasso tool to copy the pupil and created another layer (Ctrl+J) to paste it in and then hid it in the layers palette.  

Normally I would use the Lasso or Magnetic Lasso tool to select the white of the eye but in the ‘Cheat’ book it suggests you use the Bézier tool to select it with as few points as possible and then turn it into selection by pressing Ctrl+Enter.

Grey shading added and blurred

I added shading around the edge of the eyeball using the Burn tool with a low opacity and built it up gradually to make it look normal.  The image here looks a bit gruesome but it all comes good in the end.

Then I softened the edges using the Blur tool.  Once I had achieved a fairly natural look I switched on the pupil layer and positioned it in between the eyelids and adjusted the position to recreate the previous look.

Eyes bright and whitened

I did exactly the same to her left eye and positioned the pupil to match.  The ‘Cheat’ manual took it a bit further and explained how to make the eye look real by changing the layer mode from Normal to Multiply so that the shading we applied showed through onto the pupil to complete the effect. 
If you group the eyeballs together (or link the layers in the Layers palette) you could move them to look the same way.