There’s a simple way to make your subject’s eyes pop in a portrait, and it doesn’t involve touching vibrance, saturation, luminosity, or any other color-based edit. In fact, you can make the full edit in 30 seconds.
This quick Photoshop tip comes to us from photographer Mathieu Stern, who uses a simple sharpening technique to make his subjects’ eyes stand out. Here’s the step by step:
1. Duplicate your background layer (your portrait).
2. Go to Filter > Other > High Pass and apply a High Pass filter with a radius of 10 pixels.
3. Set the layer blend mode to Soft Light
4. Alt+Click on the layer mask icon to create a black layer mask
5. Use a soft brush to pain white over just your subject’s eyes.
That’s it. Done right, the filter will take your subject’s eyes from this:
To this:
Helping them to stand out without that “nuclear eyes” look that so many saturation-obsessed shooters have accidentally created before. Check out the full demo in the video above, and if you like this video, head over to Mathieu’s YouTube channel for more.
