How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Open the Image

Open the image you wish to change the eye colour; either click File > Open or use keyboard short cut Ctrl + O.

Duplicate current layer

Either use short cut Ctrl + J or right click on the background layer icon in the layers palette and select duplicate layer. This will create a duplicate of the background layer named Layer 1.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Selecting the Iris

Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Either click the icon or use short cut M. place your curser on the midpoint of the left eye. Hold down Shift and Alt keys and drag a circle to cover the Iris.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Holding down shift key makes the selection a perfectly round circle and holding down Alt key defines the starting point as the centre of the circle.

Adding a Mask

Click on the Add Layer Mask icon located at the bottom of the layers palette to add a mask to Layer 1. Nothing seems to have happened; press the back slash \ key to reveal the mask in a transparent red colour.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Remember areas affected by the mask (those in red) are not affected by any change we make. And we would like our transition to be smooth so first we will add a little blur effect to smooth en the edges.

Click Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the radius value as per your preference. Since the eye is a relatively small circle I used a value of 3.

Adjusting the Mask

Once we have the mask on, we could easily adjust the masks borders. The thing to remember is that painting with black as the foreground colour adds to the mask and painting with white as the foreground colour removes the mask

In this picture there are chances that when you selected the iris, part of the eyelid or the white area around the iris could have been included in the selection. And we do not intend to change colour in those areas. So select black as foreground colour and paint over areas that you wish to be masked out.

Tip: pressing X switches the foreground and background colours

Add a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer

Press and hold down the Alt key and press and hold down the left mouse button on the Fill / Adjustment Layer button to select the Hue / Saturation option. Release both keys and the new layer window appears.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Enable the option 'Use previous layer to create clipping mask' and click OK. The Hue/Saturation window pops up.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Time to Play with Eye Colour

Now you have many options to change the eye colour, either you could use the Master option in the edit window and adjust the sliders to change the colour.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

If you would prefer more control and since in this case the eye colour is blue select blue from the edit box and use eyedropper tool to select the blur from the iris, use + eyedropper tool to add other shades of blue appearing in the iris and then adjust the sliders to achieve the desired effect.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Remember the values you used for the sliders.

Change Colour of the other Eye

Now press Shift + Ctrl + Alt + E to Create a new layer embedded with the contents of all the visible layers. This layer will be named Layer 2.

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Repeat steps 3 to 7.

This is our finished result

How to Change Eye Colour in Photoshop

Congratulations, you have now successfully changed the colour of eyes.

In the next article we will discuss about Photography - Post Production - Adding Eye Shadow, Eye-liner and Mascara to your Photo in Photoshop

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