Little things can make a big difference in a portrait. That’s particularly true when it comes a subject’s eyes where subtle changes in sharpness, color, or direction can really make or break a portrait.
But just because you couldn’t capture a subject’s eyes the way you wanted them during a shoot doesn’t mean all is lost. With the right edits in Photoshop, you can turn a dull portrait into one that shines just by tweaking the eyes.
In the below tutorial, expert retoucher Glyn Dewis shows you how to get “perfect eyes” in a portrait using Photoshop’s neural filters. We told you about neural filters in a “tip of the week” last year that ended up being one of Digital Photo‘s most popular stories of 2021. This new imaging editing tool in Photoshop really is astounding and Dewis shows you how to harness its power to get the look you want.
“Without doubt, this was the most challenging photo shoot, I’ve had to date,” Dewis says. “But the success of the final image was down to one slider. Often, it’s the small things we do that make the big difference.”
In the video at the bottom of this story, Dewis takes you through a photo shoot of a female surfer and explains how Photoshop’s neural filters were used “to quickly and easily change the direction of the surfer’s eyes.”
He begins the tutorial by doing a quick edit of the photo using the new Selections and Masking tools in Lightroom “to bring the sky and the sea to life.” Then at around the 5:47-minute mark he shows you how he changed the direction of the surfer’s eyes with neural filters.
“It’s a very simple, effective and realistic way of changing the eye direction, which can make a massive difference to your picture,” he concludes. “I don’t know about you but there have been so many times in the past where I’ve taken quick photos of friends or family and then you look at the picture and go: ‘Oh, you weren’t looking at the camera.’ To be able to change it now so that they are looking at the camera makes a massive difference.”
