I purposed, before the birth of my daughter, to be the kind of mom I'd long wanted to be. At all costs. Unbeknownst to her, my daughter had thrown me a challenge. I needed to use my God-given talents and life's passions to be productive while still working around her needs and her schedule. Here are some daily adventures and small successes.

12/12/2011

i-ball - Montreal's South Shore photographer

A few weeks ago I did a quick tut on my basic paint Shop Pro editing process. Response was great, and it's still one of my most visited posts.

I've since noticed that there is relatively little out there in the way of Corel Paint Shop Pro tutorials. That' really too bad. It's a great little program that can do a whole lot.

So here's a real quickie on how I go about editing eyes. Even if you use another editing software, this may prove helpful to you.

For the tutorial, I want to go all out and make the before and after pretty dramatic for you. I'm therefore using an image where we only see one eye. 2 eyes is trickier. Add or take away too much, and you have suddenly given someone deux yeux dans l'même trou, as we say in French. So when editing a standard 2-eyes portrait, be sure to take 'er easy.

We'll start with this image:





Zooming in, I select my dodge tool and size it appropriately, keeping my opacity under 20. I usually work with a hardness of 0 to 10 for this.


I not only dodge the light spots in the eye, but I will dodge the white of the eye itself, which makes a big difference. Again, I'm able to go all out here since I only have the one eye to consider, so this edit is a little more evident.


Next, I switch to the burn tool. I size it a little more finely and again keep my opacity low.


I'll burn the dark line around the iris, the shadow just under the top eyelid, and sometimes I'll darken the lashes.


The eyes look larger and have really secured their place as the focal point of the image. But because light usually refracts off our eyes as hard (and not soft and vapourous), I still have one more step.

I'll select my sharpen tool. I usually size it so that the extremities of the brush reach to both the top and bottom eyelids.


Using single dabs, I slowly sharpen, being careful not to touch the skin and not get too grainy.


And done.

Here's the final result of this little guy:


Hope you got something out of that one! 

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