Tutorial: Fantasy Eyes
How to make fantasy eyes.
I made this tutorial in Photoshop 7, but it will work in Paintshop too. It is adapted from this tutorial by millergurl. I thank her for getting me started. :-)
Alright. This technique works best on subjects with light coloured eyes, but those with brown eyes will work too. You may have to tweak a little.
I'm going to start with this picture of Raffaelo Balzo. We are going to make eyes in the style of Gambit from X-men.
Note: my pic is much more hi-rez, I've scaled down the above to save space.
Open your picture. Zoom in on the eyes until you feel you can work with them easily.
Select an eye using the Elipse marquee tool. For Paintshop users, start with the mouse in the middle of the pupil and pull out to select the eye. It may take a few tries, but you'll get the hang of it. Layer via copy in Photoshop or promote selection in Paintshop. Repeat on the other eye. Don't worry if the eyes aren't perfectly selected, it won't matter if you have a bit of extra around them.
Turn off your bottom, base layer. You should have your two iris/pupils showing. Merge visible. Turn the bottom layer back on.
Make a new layer above the layer your eyes on are on. Select your paintbrush tool. Mine was size 9 round, but you can decide what size and shape you want to work with. I used the colour 9E0B0E for this, but again, it's up to you what colour you want to use. Paint over the irises and pupils of both eyes. You don't have to be exact, just make sure you have them covered.
Switch the layer mode to overlay. You might want to erase the colour over any light reflections in the eyes, but that's optional. If you like the colour, excellent. If you don't, try again with a different colour. One thing that make happen with red colouring and blue eyes is that it looks purple. If this happens, merge the colouring layer and the layer with the eyes on it, then play around with curves or color balance until they look the way you want them to. Don't worry about any colouring outside the eye, we'll fix that later.
Changing the sclera
If you want your eyewhites to be a different colour, hang on. If you're happy with just the irises, skip down.
Make a new layer under the eye layer (in between the base and 2nd layer). Select the colour of your choice (I've used black) and paint in the eyewhites with the same brush as before. You don't have to worry about the iris because it's above the layer you're on. Again, don't worry about any stray colour outside the lines.
Optional step: you can take a small dodge brush on low opacity and run over the irises on the eye layer in a few spots to give some depth and uniqueness if you'd like.
Alright, as you can see from the picture in the above step we have some cleaning to do. Select an eraser (mine was 9 round). Click on the top layer and erase the extra red (you might want to lower the opacity to see where you need to work). When you're done with that, click on the eye layer. Erase the little white lines around the edge of the eye (you only need to do this if you've changed the sclera colour). Click on the eyewhite layer. Erase the extra black (again, you might want to lower the opacity). When you're happy with all the erasing, flatten the image.
This is the image I ended up with. Save your picture under different name if you want to keep the original image. You now have a funky-eyed soul to use in graphics. Such as:
Other examples:
Hope that was understandable and helpful! Thanks for stopping by!