Re-touching Dark Brown Eyes - Can it Be Done?

[bkkstudios]

<p>There are 100s of posts on the internet on re-touching eyes, including here, and invariably, they never use an Asian model! </p>

<p>All my models are Thai, and they all have dark brown (near black) eyes. All the techniques I've tried don't seem to work very well to produce a natural color. No problem with light colored eyes. The issue is that with dark eyes, there are no 'striations' (I don't know what is the correct word for the iris' spider-like light and dark colors that emanate from the pupil), so when u recolor, u just get a big blob of new color that looks very un-natural. See attached for a typical 'bad' re-coloring which is about the best I can do.</p>

<p>So, my question is, can very dark colored eyes actually be re-colored?</p>

<p>Another technique I've been thinking about is to simply replace the eye with those from a light-colored model, but that would take more time to get right.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

[Matt Laur]

<p>It will help if you mention what software you're using. <br /><br />It looks like you need to take better control of the masking. Your model's pupils are quite dilated, but you're coloring the pupil, not just the iris. Only apply the color change to the iris, or you get that dog's-eyes-at-night color that looks like a reflection from the retina.<br /><br />You might also have better luck if you get more light onto the eyes in the first place. Your example shot looks pretty under-exposed, which means you're working with less contrast and detail.<br /><br />On an unrelated note, be careful with that sharpening ... the hard edges on her nose and the edges of her eyes, for example, look very unnatural compared to the other features on her face that you're blurring. Your urge to do that will go down if you can get the light and exposure better from the start.</p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>Thx Matt, but I think this is the issue with dark eyes, you can't get the contrast of dark and light patterns in the eyes even with greater exposure. I just looked through a sample of 20 shoots, and the brown/black just melds into this one glob of dark color.</p>

<p>(Note - it's over-sharpened for printing)</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>The problem I'm seeing is that you're altering the color on the part of the eye that's <em>supposed</em> to be black (the pupil). You don't need anything to automatically detect tone in this case, because you can just make the mask the right shape yourself, with a couple of mouse clicks. The pupil has no need to be involved in the process, and thus shouldn't ever turn colors on you.</p>

[plasma181]

<p>And don't forget to put a little more muscle in the bicep. </p>

<p>But seriously, I try not to mess too much with eyes. Generally, I will take out red-eye, but I don't change eye color. <br>

In difficult lighting situations, you can actually use the white of the eye as a grey card. </p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>I could give other examples, but the pupil is not really the issue in general. It's masked correctly in other pics. It's the fact the dark color when simply changed to a different color looks un-natural.</p>

<p>PS. this is a lady, unlike my other models :)</p>

[Dieter Schaefer]

<p>As Matt pointed out - you colored the pupil as well which looks quite unnatural. If you feel the need to recolor the model's eyes, why not have her wear colored contacts in the first place?</p>

[tom_mann1]

<p>It's a lot like changing the color of a black (or very dark) piece of clothing to a different, lighter color. It's not easy, but can be done if there is actual tonal detail present in the dark areas. As I recall, after selection, I first completely desaturated the black clothing item, then carefully adjusted the tones to lighten it a bit. I seem to recall that the shadows/highlights tool was a fairly good way to initially tackle this part of the process.</p>

<p>At this point, you will almost certainly have to adjust the contrast because it will likely be either way too flat or way too contrasty. I then used a color gradient map to add the new color back in realistic way, much as if I was colorizing an old B&W photo.</p>

<p>I know I've seen on-line tutorials about colorizing a black garment, but I couldn't find any in a quick search. </p>

<p>HTH,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

[ellis_vener_photography]

<p>Ziggy,<br>

The first tip here might help: http://bit.ly/gP0RjQ</p>

[tom_mann1]

<p>@Ellis - +1</p>

<p>PS to Ziggy - I forgot to mention the obvious: If the final scale of reproduction of the image is small and you can get away with it, just drop in the irises of some other person. It's really not that hard if you work at 200% or more magnification and the final image won't be large.</p>

<p>I also forgot to mention that the reason for initially desaturating the dark object is because large errors in hue and saturation are very common in the darker parts of images, so, when you try to brighten them up, they look very strange. This is undoubtedly the phenomena you ran into. In addition, when, after desaturation, you bring up their brightness, temporarily desaturate the entire image. It's much easier to adjust the brightness of the temporarily B&W irises if they are in context of a B&W background. This step will put their brightness and contrast into roughly the right range. You can then do a final tuning of this part of the image after you bring back color everywhere.</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

[don_bryant2]

<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://bit.ly/gP0RjQ" target="_blank">> http://bit.ly/gP0RjQ</a></p>

<p>Thanks for that one Ellis!</p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>I circled the eye with my big brush softer,<br>

set the background black,<br>

and made the mask faster<br>

Then I de-saturated the bunch,<br>

And turned up the brightness,<br>

Look now 'bro I can the lightness!<br>

Then with a hue layer added,<br>

I turned them to blue,<br>

And lo and behold a Thai become you!<br>

So that's the way to do it,<br>

You nerdy p'shoppers,<br>

Next time just rap,<br>

And your brown eyes won't be crap!</p>

[richard_dulkin]

<p>The technique I am going to describe uses Photoshop CS5.<br>

After all other areas of the photo are to your liking, select the pupil and iris of each eye. I use the quick select tool, then refine edges. Set the smart radius edge at a convenient size, smooth, feather and contrast. Now copy and past this into a new transparent layer. Make a group folder for it and make sure that the triangle is pointing downward to keep all the rest of your adjustment layers in, then place the eye layer inside it. Add an adjustment layer for hue and saturation and remove the saturation from the eyes so that they are a black and white image. If your image has good black and white seperation now between the pupil and the iris you are set, probably you won't.<br>

Next, add a levels adjustment layer and in the output area move the slider puck from the black area into the middle grays, watching the image to see the best result. There should be separation now between the iris and the pupil and with in the iris; but all should be shades of gray with no black (ignore the white of the reflections for now). If you still don't have workable separation within the web or aurora of the iris, add a brightness / contrast adjustment layer. This should do the trick.<br>

Now, add back a Hue/saturation adjustment layer and pick the hue you wish the iris to be (don't worry about the pupil). If you can't get the shade of brown you wish, remember that brown is made up of red and green, so if necessary make one with red iris and one with green and adjust as needed, with one overlaying the other. The pupil will probably be off from a nice black, so...<br>

Turn the triangle of the iris group folder to the right to close it and make a new transparent layer. With the marquee oval tool, make a "circular" shape over the pupil and fill with black. Make a new layer and repeat for the other pupil.<br>

Now you can go and add back the reflection. But you have choices. You can add back what you had, or you can have a different reflection. You can make them and keep them such as a window, remember to curve the lines as they would be on a spherical surface. Or add any shape reflection you wish as long as it is consistent with the rest of the lighting, especially on the iris. For each reflection, make a new transparent layer.<br>

Hope this was helpful.</p>

[htarragon]

<p>First of all, you focused on her bracelet, not on her eyes, thus eye fuzziness.<br>

In PSE6, I<br>

1. Set black, grey and white levels using her shirt and shadowed hair<br>

2. Filled in lipstick lightly<br>

3. Removed lower lights in eyes<br>

4. Increased contrast by +17<br>

Doesn't give iris/pupil separation but improves the picture overall.</p>

<p> </p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Hey, dark brown eyes aren't just Asian. Heck, I'm totally Nordic* in ancestry and have dark brown eyes (2 of them).</p>

<p>_________<br>

*If, that is, Great Uncle Hugo's baptismal records provided for his membership in certain political organizations were OK :(</p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>Still can't seem to get this right.</p>

<p>Using the ideas illustrated, this is my result which doesn't look natural. What I'm looking for is a light blue eye.</p>

<p>Also, once an eye is de-saturated, it seems you cannot recolor it?</p>

<p>Thx.</p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>Pic</p><div></div>

[bkkstudios]

<p>I seem to only be able to get a natural look using a gradient on the original eye without desaturation. But even then it doesn't have the 'striations' (dark like lines starting from the edge of the iris towards the pupil) like a normal blue eye has; those seem to be lost in brown eyes.</p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>ZS: <em>"...Also, once an eye is de-saturated, it seems you cannot recolor it?.."</em></p>

<p>Not true. Once some object has no saturation, *some* tools for re-coloring have no effect, but other color changing tools work just fine. For example, pushing the hue slider around in the Hue/Saturation tool will have absolutely no effect on a desaturated object, but if you click on the "colorize" box in the same tool, you can make the object assume any color one wants. </p>

<p>ZS: <em>"...I seem to only be able to get a natural look using a gradient on the original eye ..."</em></p>

<p>I was referring to a color gradient map, not a normal gradient. The color gradient map assigns a color (ie, hue+saturation) to each tonal value (degree of lightness/darkness). This tool is widely used in re-coloring old photos during the process of restoration. Since color gradient maps are not widely used, in the example, below, I simply used the "colorize" option of the "Hue/Saturation" tool to add a single color back into the iris instead of using the color gradient map tool which can add multiple colors.</p>

<p>ZS: <em>"...But even then it doesn't have the 'striations' (dark like lines starting from the edge of the iris towards the pupil) like a normal blue eye has; those seem to be lost in brown eyes..."</em></p>

<p>I don't know if this is generally true, but it certainly is true of the model in your example image. Her/his iris seems to have more of a "pebbly" texture rather than radial striations.</p>

<p>To give you an idea of what can be done, I tweaked your example image. Attached to this message is the layer stack that I used. In the next post, I discuss each layer and show the result of these operations.</p>

<p>Tom M.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>I started the process by using ACR from CS5 to (a) sharpen your close-up crop of the eye to restore texture.</p>

<p>Next, I used a plugin called, "Asiva Select" to select just the dark brown tones of his/her iris. This tool works a lot like the "Color Range" tool on the Select menu, but is much more flexible. It is critically important that you select only the brown tones of the iris, and not the brighter specular reflections, not brighter the sclera, and not the darker pupil. "Asiva Select" allows one to do this in one step. If you don't get this step right, no changes that you make will look right, so spend plenty of time on this step. For example, you can see that I masked each and every adjustment layer using this selection.</p>

<p>Once out of ACR and into PS, the 1st change was to use the "Shadow/highlights" tool to bring up the brightness and adjust the contrast of the brown iris. The next step was to completely desaturate it. My first "Hue/saturation" layer accomplishes this.</p>

<p>My next "Hue/saturation" layer (colorization box checked) re-introduces color into the gray iris produced by the previous step.</p>

<p>Next, I used a local contrast tool to bring out the texture in the iris. I happened to use "Topaz Details 2" because it allows me a lot of flexibility, but almost any of other local contrast tool including USM (used appropriately) would have worked.</p>

<p>I noticed that the pupil of your model was quite small, so my final step was to select circular region a bit larger than the present pupil and use this to mask a "Levels" adjustment layer set to darken this area. I used a "blend-if" setting on this layer to darken only the existing pupil and a bit of the surrounding iris, but not darken the bright specular reflections in this area.</p>

<p>The result is show in the attached file. My tweak is on the left, your tweak is on the right. I went for a modest blue-green gray instead of an iridescent, highly saturated blue to try to keep it looking realistic, but you may want to wind up with a more spectacular change. If you send me an email, I'll be happy to send you the PS file that I used, and you can play with the color yourself.</p>

<p>HTH,</p>

<p>Tom M</p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>Finally, here is the mask I used to select only the (brown) iris in your original image.</p>

<p>Tom M</p><div></div>

[tom_mann1]

<p>Your question about radial striae being more common in blue eyes fascinated me, so I used Google images to pull up some pix. I did two searches:</p>

<p>{brown iris -flower +eye} and <br>

{blue iris -flower +eye}</p>

<p>There appears to be lots of variants of each color. I'm not sure I can draw any firm conclusions about this. Perhaps the striae are just easier to see in a lighter colored iris?</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>Thx a lot Tom. I really appreciate your time on this. I think I recreated all your steps.</p>

<p>I would add 1 or 2 steps which help slightly. I gaussian blur the mask for the pupil to get it slightly more natural, and added some noise in the recoloring part, and I think the extreme circumference of the iris should be a darker color than the inner part, through a mask and levels adjustment.</p>

<p>I went through about 25 of my models and none seem to have the radial striae even on close-ups with good light, unless it's so subtle the camera is not picking it up! Maybe it's a genetic thing for Thais. I tried adding that in manually, but it just takes too long.</p>

 

[tom_mann1]

<p>Hi Ziggy - I got your email and just sent you the PS file that I used. Hope it helps.</p>

<p>Tom</p>