Bright eyes photoshop tutorial

Though it's only March here in Minnesota (that's usually dead center of the hard cruel winter) Spring seems to be here.  The kids and I went out to soak up some rays of sun and I wanted to capture a few of the moments but of course, like all good moments, I was enjoying them and hadn't toted along my camera.  All I had was an iphone. So I snapped away and when I later loaded the snaps of the day onto my computer I was pretty let down.  None of the sun was captured. None of the brightness of the early Spring through the eyes of a toddler lit up my monitor.

   Photoshop can fix that.  I have Elements 8 and here's the tutorial on what I did to turn some iphone pics that weren't even quality enough to print for grandma into something that makes my little girl look lovely.

Here's what one of the shots looked like straight off the iphone:

After a little time on Photoshop

Step 1) Brighten entire image. Go to Enhance, brighten, 30%
Step 2) Zoom in on face using Cntl +
    She had a messy face and circles under her eyes.  Select Clone tool. Set to 35% to clean up     crumbs around lips.  Set to 13% to clean up under eyes.
Step 3) Lips. Use eyedropper tool to select lip color. Select brush tool and brush size to work as lip pencil. Fill in lips a bit.
Step 4) Eyes.  In this photo the dark blue is already pretty darn awesome, but there's absolutely no luminosity, no spark- her eyes look like monocolored zombie eyes. I want to add the light blue and gold around the pupils. Use brush tool, select a nice sky blue color. Opacity 12%.  Dot around iris.
Select gold color for fire around pupil. Draw it like spokes around a tire.
Step 5) Accents. Cntrl D to set palette back to black. Use brush like eyeliner and dot it in along lashes. Add few dots of black to lashes. few dots of black to outer edge of iris and lower eyelid.
Step 6)Smooth skin using Blur tool (looks like water drop) 100% strength.  Go over skin avoiding mouth and eyes and nostrils.

Done.