How do I whiten eyes?

- When dealing with subjects, sometimes eyes can look a little bloodshot, or don't quite have that same brightness to them. Let's quickly fix our subject's eyes, and brighten up the overall white area outside of the iris and the pupil. Let's go to our subject here. And I'll go to a regular view, and using the navigator, really go into the eye. What we're going to want to do is brighten things up. There's a couple of ways of doing this. One method, is you can use the radial filter.

This allows you to click and make a selection. And what we can do is place that right on the subject. Adjusting the shape a little bit. There we go. And the relative position. Now, what I suggest is that you come down here, and make sure you control what's happening. So I'm going to invert that, so it goes inside only. Let's reset things here. So we'll remove the clarity and the dehaze.

Now what I can do is play with things, like the white point. You see that I can brush that to open it up. Now this is a little bit tough, because it's overlapping with her hair. So you might find that you need to adjust the shape of this, and the relative position, or turn to the adjustment brush, so you can paint in the effect. Let's do that on the other eye here. What I can do is take my adjustment brush, and just paint those areas.

Remember, you can adjust the Show Overlay Command, which is going to be under the tools menu. So you can see the overlay. Choosing red, or green as you work. There it is. So the green overlay helps me see the edges, and by using edge detection, I'm avoiding getting too much of the other area. Holding down the option key, I can subtract if it spills into the eyelid.

Now, we'll go back to Adjustment Mask Overlay, and hide that. And make sure that there's no color selected down here. So let's set that back to zero. Now with that active selection, it's very easy to adjust the exposure there. I can bring that up, and I can even desaturate a bit to cut down on the reddish veins. There we go. Pull down the clarity slightly, and even the dehaze a little bit until you get the desired effect.

And that allows you to paint in the adjustment. So you see here on this side, I did the overall radial mask. And I'm not as happy with it. So let's get rid of that. Grab the adjustment brush, and we'll simply paint with the same settings. There we go. Hold down the option key to subtract. There we go. Remove the color. And simply adjust things like the exposure, and the saturation, as well as clarity, until you get the type of eyes you like.

There we go. Let's put that side-by-side now. And you'll see that the eyes are brighter. Even though we didn't touch the irises or anything else. By creating a brighter area around the eyes, we've really brought the eye out. Now earlier, I showed you dark circle removal and eye enhance and perfectly clear. You've already seen how that works. Let's just tackle this one more time, sticking only in light room. And I'll quickly fix this. On our next photo here, we'll punch in, and go to the one-to-one view.

If the eye is not obstructed, I suggest grabbing your adjustment brush, and turning on the overlays here so you can see it. I'll remove the color. And just paint, to quickly select. Get the iris, press "O" to turn the overlay off. Adjust the exposure. Reduce the saturation. Refine the clarity. Now, let's grab the radial mask, and draw over the eye itself.

We'll adjust the shape there. And let's set that to inside, so we'll invert it. And what I'll do here, is reduce the clarity and the dehaze, but bring out the saturation a little bit, and lift the exposure slightly. Now, if you look at the side-by-side comparison here, you'll see that this eye is a little sharper, a little brighter for the iris, and that the whites of the eye provide a great frame to offset that beautiful rich color.

On the left-hand side here, it needs a little bit more adjusting, but this is an opportunity where you can continue to practice or do just one eye and compare it to the original.