difficulty rating: ★★✩✩✩
if you’ve never used layers or masks, then: ★★★★★
how to adjust someone’s eye color the arleigh way. I don’t know how the professionals do it, but this is the method I use. you will learn how to use a layer and a mask.

although I’m a photoshop purist, I admit to whitening teeth, healing a blemish or two, and adjusting eye color. for this demonstration, we will change my son’s eyes to red. just for giggles.
1. download [this lovely photo] by right-clicking (PC) or option-clicking (mac) on the link, and open it in photoshop.

2. open your layers palette.

3. make a copy of the background layer by dragging it to the little folded piece of paper next to the trash can at the bottom of the palette.

you now have two identical layers.

4. now select the lasso tool, and click the second box that allows you to add-to-your selection (see image below) and roughly select the eyes (see image below the image below).


5. create a mask. ooh, isn’t this exciting?
while the eyes are selected, click the square with a circle at the bottom of the palettes menu.

your palette will look like this:

but your image still looks the same, so…
6. hide the bottom layer, the “background,” by clicking the eye.

7. now we’re going to use the mask to isolate just the eyes. make sure the mask is selected by click on it once.

8. select the brush tool.

9. choose the hard round brush. change the size as you need.

10. choose black to make the mask conceal, and white to reveal.

11. paint on the mask with the black to erase away the skin and whites of the eyes.

12. don’t worry if you accidentally erase too much. you can switch to white and brush it back in. also, you can always come back to the mask and adjust it before you flatten layers.

this is approximately what your file should look like before you move to the next step:

13. now click the eyeball box to show the bottom layer.

this is what you should see. it won’t look like you’ve made any changes, but you have. honest.

14. choose the image in the duplicate layer. in layers palette, click on the image in the top layer, not the mask.

15. open hue/saturation adjustment menu. in your image pull-down menu, choose “adjustments” and “hue/saturation”

16. in hue/saturation menu, make sure “colorize” and “preview” are selected.

17. play around with “hue” and bring up the saturation a bit. it WILL look too saturated. that’s okay, we’ll fix that in a bit. click “OK” when you’re ready.

18. change layer to “hue”. going back to the layers palette, make sure the top layer is selected and click on the little “normal” menu, choose “hue”.

19. now we’ll play with opacity. (opacity is the lack of transparency. at 100% opacity, the hue layer is not transparent at all.) click on the little arrow and choose a different percentage of opacity.

like maybe 63%

note: this would be a good time to go back to the mask and paint black to conceal, white to reveal. remember to select the mask in the layers palette before you paint on that layer.
20. flatten. if you are finished with mask adjustment, the eye color changes, and the layer transparency, head on over to the layer menu at the top of your screen and “flatten image”.

21. and you’re DONE. your file should look something like this:
