Tutorial Brightening doll eyes with PS (dodge tool)

I'm a lazy person and getting my girl's glass eyes to light up can be a pain sometimes. Even when I have good lighting, play with my flash and "cheat" by using a flash light sometimes I just can't light the eyes without lighting the whole face. Therefore, I had to find a way to get that gorgeous "glowing reflection" effect from my $10 glass eyeballs via Photoshop (I have PS6).

Today we're going to "cheat" by using the dodge tool at about 20-40% hardness making the size just big enough to cover the iris without touching the pupils. It takes some playing around with but the results can be nice.

This is the dodge tool:

This is what the settings look like:


Side note: all of these images have had their color adjusted using the curves function before I played with the dodge tool.

No dodge - just curves and pop-up flash for lighting.


Dodge - 30% hardness with two passes


Close up - no dodge:


Close up - dodge 30% hardness -1 pass


Close up - dodge 30% hardness - 2 passes


Close up - dodge 30% hardness - 3 passes (a little over done for my taste but everyone is different)


Questions section:

Then crank up the dodge to some crazy high % (ie 50+) and hit the iris like a freight train. Or leave it at 30% and then take as many passes as you feel like. I prefer more passes because it gives me better control.

Either undo (crt+z) and shrink the size of the brush down to the width of your iris or turn the dodge tool into the burn tool (right click the dodge) and burn the pupil back out (make sure the size is only the size of the pupil).


Hopefully that helped all the lazy people like me.