I stumbled upon a cool little trick while messing about with layer styles last week and thought I would put it out there and see if it’s any use to anybody. The only practical application I’ve found for it (so far) is for enhancing eyes so that’s what we’ll do in this tutorial.
First make a selection of the iris with the circular marquee tool. This can be a little tricky if the subject is not facing straight on to camera like in this image but if you hold down the space bar while making the selection you can finesse it into place. Don’t go too close to the edge with the selection.
[click thumbnail to see a larger image]
With the selection active, select the ‘refine edge’ command and feather the selection. The idea is just to soften the edge a little, don’t go to far. Click OK.
Select ‘Layer via copy” from the Layer/New menu or hit the Apple+J key command. This jumps your selection onto it’s own layer.
We need to get rid of the small part of the eyelid that has been copied into this layer. Using the circular marquee tool select the part of the iris that you want to keep. Once selected use the ‘refine edge’ command again to feather the selection, your previous settings should still be active so just click OK.
Inverse the selection either via the Select/Inverse menu or with the key command, Apple+Shift+I. Delete the selection leaving you with a nice selection of the iris.
From the bottom of the layers palette (or the Layer/Layer Style menu) add an Inner Glow. At first it looks pretty nasty with a pale yellow line around the iris, but stick with me!
In the Layer Styles box change the colour to black and the blend mode to Multiply. Adjust the ’size’ slider to something suitable for the resolution of image your working on but try not to make it too large. Click OK.
With the iris layer selected change the blend mode to screen. This will probably look a bit over the top so just lower the opacity until it looks more natural.
And here’s a before & after…
What I like about this technique is that the layer style is completely editable, leaving you able to change your mind and tweak the settings down the line…which is nice!
Guidelines