Change Eye Color In Photoshop: An Incredibly Easy Method That Works For All

In this Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to quickly change eye color in Photoshop. You will learn a non-destructive technique using groups, Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layers, and Levels Adjustment Layers to complete the eye color effect.

Hello everybody my name is Charles. In this tutorial, we’re gonna learn how to quickly change eye color in Photoshop. So the first thing we need to do is make a selection around the eyes. First, I wanna kinda zoom into the eyes, I’m gonna hit Z for the zoom tool and I’m gonna click in the area right in between her eyes here to get a clear zoom. And I’m gonna press the space bar down and my cursor turns into a hand tool, and then I could just move the image over.

Select The Eyes To Change Eye Color In Photoshop

So I’m gonna use the Lasso tool to make this selection. There’s a lot of different tools you can use L for the Lasso tool. And I’m gonna make a selection around the iris and it doesn’t have to be perfect. So you can just get as close as you can just around the iris is all you need. Okay that’s one selected. And if I hold down the Shift key right next to the Lasso tool, it turns into a plus that tells Photoshop that I am going to add to these selection. And I can continue going around the other eye and as you can see, it’s not perfect but that’s okay. So now we have both eyes selected.

So now before we go any further, I wanna clean up this selection. I’m going to double click over here where the Quick Mask is, the way I’m using this is the selected area is these color red. So that’s the where I had that set up. And I’m in the Quick Mask mode, you can see the areas of the iris that are selected. And now with the Brush tool, B for the brush tool, I’m gonna paint with black, zoom in here a little bit more. I have 100% opacity in my flow, I’m gonna put 45 or so. I use my left and right brackets to pick my brush as big or small as I need and I’m just gonna draw around the area like this and get that selection as best as I can.

And in this photo, we’re changing her eyes from blue to green so I wanna try and get some of that blue out of there. And I want to switch my brush to white because right in here where the pupil is, I don’t want that to be selected. I don’t want any color to come through there and then also there’s this catch light here. It is probably from light or a flash, and I so painted away that color and I go over to the other eye do the same thing. Get rid of that blue around the edges as carefully as I can.

I’m zoomed in here pretty good so we’re gonna get everything. And if I make any mistakes, I would just change my brush to white and paint that out of there, change it to white and paint out the area in the pupil and the catch light, we don’t want that colored. That’s why we’re painting it out with a brush white, so now we’ll hit Q to get out of Quick Mask mode and there is our selection around both eyes.

Now I’m going to create a hue in saturation adjustment layer, and you can see our mask here is the two white dots, which are the areas that are going to be affected by the hue and saturation. The rest of the mask is black and everything is hidden.

Use Hue/Saturation To Eyes To Change Eye Color In Photoshop

And now I like to use this colorize option. So once I click colorize, you can see that the eyes kinda turned a little reddish, and now we can change to hue all the way across. You can see that the color of the eyes are changing all the way from the reds going to green, blue purple or to red. I think I’m going to put this right around 144 and being like that. And so here we’re going from blue to green saturation. You can change that to your taste, whatever you feel, I think around 25 is good, too saturated and it won’t look natural.

And for hue and saturation, this adjustment layer mainly changed the hue and saturation lightness, I would leave alone because we’re going to take care of that with another adjustment layer. I just feel that it looks a little bit more natural if we don’t use this lightness adjustment here, but I am gonna change the blend mode to color. So there’s probably gonna be a subtle difference when you change that blend mode to color, but you should see more of the original details in the eye.

So now let’s add a levels adjustment so that we can adjust the lightness of the eyes. So I’m going to command control and click on the layer mask of the human saturation so that I can bring the selection back. And I’m going to come down here to levels adjustment, and now I’m using that same mask. And as you can see when I’m changing, I’m gonna try just a midpoint right here and change it just a little bit. And so that’s changed the lightness of the eyes, maybe a little bit darker. I’m gonna rename this light lightness.

And now I think I’d like to add another level of adjustment. I wanna bring back some of the lightness in the eye in the other areas. Let’s see how that works here. We know command or control and click on the layer mask, bringing back my selection and create another levels adjustment. in this time I’m going to bring up the white point a little bit, and you can see in the eyes how just in the middle where the bright areas are, it’s starting to come up. And let’s put this at something like 188.

So now I want to bring up the layer style dialog, ’cause I want that effect just to be in the lighter areas, I don’t want it to be in darker areas. So I’m gonna come down here to this underlying layer and hold Alt option and I am going to split this. So now it’s just in the lighter areas of the iris and I can come up here to the opacity and change that a little bit of how I want and say okay. So there is the before and there’s after, so have brought out some of those lighter areas. And now to make it easier to come back here and change any of these values,

I’m going to create a group command G and I’m going to copy the layer mask here so that this group has one layer mask. And I’m going to put all the other layers in this group and I’m gonna delete each of these layer masks. And now anytime I wanna go back into this and change it, you have one layer mask. So this is blue to green, I can go to any of these adjustments and change any of my values that was blue to green eye.

Okay let’s do another example. Let’s do brown to blue eyes. So let’s click on the bottom layer hit Z for the Zoom tool, click right there in the middle of her eyes. So it zooms in at that point, hold down the space bar, hoop the whole image over and let’s make a selection like we did before.

Hit L for the Lasso tool, and we’re gonna go around the iris and already my hand is not steady, press down shift. And now we told Photoshop, we’re gonna add to this selection and around the eyes again, just the iris and hit Q to go back in the Quick Mask, B for the Brush tool, switch our color to paint with black, zoom in a little bit more. And just in the areas right, did a horrible job of making these selections, but that’s the thing with Photoshop. You have all these tools that you can go back and correct your mistakes refine like in this case is the selection and we’re removing the brown areas that are spilling over here, a little bit of red there. Okay, now we can paint out by here in the pupil, bring back this catch light right here. We don’t want that color to be covering this catch light and the pupil. I’m done with this side okay.

Now that’s pretty good hit Q to get out of Quick Mask. There’s our selection and like before bring our hue and saturation adjustment layer, click on colorize. And we said we were going for blue. Ooh something around 200. And we have saturation. I’m gonna bring this saturation to like 37 and change to blend mode to color. And now like we did before you click on the layer mask, hold control or command, here is our selection and create a levels adjustment, and we can adjust our levels so that we can get the lightness of the eye. And I like that, and we’re just name this lightness.

And now we want to bring out more of the light areas again. So I’m going to command or control and click on my lightness layer mask to bring back my selection, paint a new levels adjustment and bring up the white point here. It’s a 198 and I’m gonna double click on there to bring up my layer styles. And on the underlying layer, I want to hold alt option and just bring that away from the shadows. I just want it in the lighter areas you know, also lower the opacity a little bit and say okay, and create another group.

And you know, I’m gonna call this brown to blue hold Alt option, and I’m gonna copy this layer mask here. And I’m gonna move all the other layers into that group. I don’t need these layer masks. So I’m gonna delete the layer mask. And now I’ve gone from blue to green on the left there’s before and there’s the after. And I’ve also gone from brown to blue, there’s before and there’s the after.

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