Whether you shoot portraits, wildlife images, or cute photos of your beloved pets, the eyes are the most important element to get dialed with precision. Achieving accurate focus on the subject’s iris when capturing an image goes a long way to achieving this goal. But there’s much more you can do to accentuate the eyes during post processing.

This tutorial comes from the f64 Academy, a popular YouTube channel dedicated to creating the finest image-editing videos for photographers of all skill levels. This episode walks you through a step-by-step Photoshop method for making bland-looking eyes a thing of the past.

Instructor Blake Rudis is an expert at all things Adobe and he introduces today’s challenge with a question: “We ensure we nail focus on the eye when we’re shooting, but why does our focus have to stop in the camera?” He answers this question by demonstrating how to use Gradients in Photoshop to create amazing eyes in people, wildlife, and pets.

Rudis covers a lot of ground in less than 13-minutes, so we encourage you to download his free PDF cheat sheet with the link beneath the video. The first step for making eyes more vibrant and captivating is using Photoshop’s Lasso tool to select the subject’s iris in the manner Rudis explains. He notes why this task needn’t be absolutely perfect, and why he limits the selection to the iris instead of the entire eye.

He then creates a Radial gradient directly over the pupil. You can use the Scale slider with two considerations in mind—the Gradient you choose and the resolution of your photo. Then you’ll learn how to use the Gradient editor to select a color that’s similar to that of the subject’s eye. This choice doesn’t have to be an exact match, because you’ll be using a simple Blend mode to blend this color with the original color of the eye.

At this point there’s an unrealistic hard edge around the mask, and Rudis demonstrates a quick trick for using the Feather tool to achieve a nice smooth transition that retains very natural color. You learn when Rudis prefers the Vivid Light Blend mode or the Hard Mix Blend mode depending upon the image at hand and the specific effect you want to achieve.

The lesson continues with a few more tweaks to refine the Gradient, and instructions for saving this adjustment. Then Rudis discusses the quickest and most effective method for editing the subject’s second eye. There are also a few tips specific to wildlife eyes, and some final suggestions for making everything look natural.

After watching the video head over to the f64 Academy YouTube channel where you’ll find a variety of other image-editing tips and tricks.

We also suggest watching the tutorial we posted from another post-processing expert who demonstrates his secrets for creating dramatic b&w photographs when editing portraits and other types of images in Photoshop.

The muskox (Ovibos Moschatus) is a massive arctic animal. It weighs up to 400 kg (880 pounds) and measures up to 2.5 meters long (over 8 feet). Although it lived across Europe during the last ice age, it went extinct on the Eurasian continent around the same time that the last wooly mammoth vanished about 3000 to 4000 years ago.

Earlier this month we featured a tutorial explaining a Lightroom technique for editing b&w photos to achieve maximum impact. The quick tutorial below takes a similar approach for all of you Photoshop users.

Instructor Brendan Williams specializes in straightforward image-editing tutorials designed to help others simplify and master daunting Photoshop techniques. It you’re tired of flat and boring monochrome photos, this seven-minute episode will quickly set you straight.

Eye-catching contrast and effective tonal separation are the hallmarks of dramatic b&w images, and flat is definitely not where it’s at. The most basic approach is simply going to Photoshop’s Adjustments panel, employing a b&w adjustment layer to strip color out of an image, and then using sliders to modify the Luminance values of individual color channels to add or subtract contrast.

But the easiet methods rarely deliver the goods and Williams explains the problem like this: “What you get is a very basic and uninteresting effect.” In other words, there’s a much better approach, and Williams explains how to add maximum impact and drama to b&w photos in less than seven minutes.

The first step occurs in Photoshop’s Adjustment panel where Williams makes a Gradient Map layer. Once this layer is created inside of the Properties panel, Williams then clicks on the Gradient preview, opens the Basics folder, and makes sure to select the B&W Gradient option.

Initially the effect may appear far too intense, but that’s easily rectified by following Williams’ instructions to adjust how the Gradient blends into the image. There are a few options available, and this is how they work: Choosing Perceptual will provide the most intense contrast, while Linear is a lot softer (therefore brightening up the effect). The Classic mode delivers results that fall somewhere in between

Once you make your choice and evaluate the image you can still use your Gradient Map to further refine the effect until it perfectly suits your fancy. With Williams’ first example, created in the Linear mode, he further accentuates Contrast by opening Photoshop’s Gradient editor and adjusting color stops to change the intensity of shadows or highlights.

Williams provides other examples, using different modifications, as the video proceeds. All this requires a bit of experimentation because every photo is a bit different as is the approach you’ll take to create the proper amount of Contrast and the specific values of highlights and shadows in the image.

There’s much more to learn by visiting Williams’ instructional YouTube channel, so be sure to take a look. And don’t miss the Lightroom tutorial mentioned above, explaining how to use that software to create incredible b&w photographs.

Lightroom’s powerful Tone Curve can dramatically improve your photographs and it’s incredibly useful for adjusting both color and b&w images. In the quick tutorial below instructor Robin Whalley demystifies this important tool, describes what goes on under the hood, and demonstrates when and how to put it to work.

Whalley is a professional landscape photographer based in the UK who posts weekly videos on editing images for maximum effect. He kicks off the episode by saying this: “The Lightroom Tone Curve is an extremely powerful but potentially confusing feature.” His goal is to cover all of the basics to you can unlock the magic of this tool and start using it today.

You’ll find the tone Curve in a dedicated panel within Lightroom’s Develop module. Whalley explains that it exists in two similar forms, yet the differences are important to understand. The first option is known as the Parametric Tone Curve where sliders are used to adjust the image, and this is the topic of the video below.

Your other choice is the Point Tone Curves, that will be covered in later lesson. By default the Tone Curve is a straight diagonal line indicating that “the curve doesn’t have any effect on your original image.” Manipulating this line is what you’ll learn how to do today for making various adjustments to the photo at hand.

Whalley’s first example illustrates what happens when you drag the Darks slider to the right. In this case the shadow tones become lighter revealing hidden detail. You’ll notice when you do this that the Curve moves up above the diagonal position. Conversely when you move the Tone Curve in the opposite direction the image is darkened.

If you want a do-over there’s a quick way to reset the effect so that the Curve reverts to the default position. If you prefer not to use sliders, simply click on the diagonal line and drag it until you see the effect you’re after. Just remember that when you move the Curve up the image is lightened, and when you it down the reverse occurs.

In many cases you may want to do both, as represented by a Curve whereby it’s above the diagonal for the highlights and below it for the shadows. Thus bright areas become brighter and dark areas become darker.

The foregoing is just the beginning of what you’ll learn by watching this episode, and by the time the video concludes we bet you’ll use the Tone Curve frequently and add it to your Lightroom bag of tricks. All you have to do to find more videos like this is pay a quick visit to Whalley’s informative YouTube channel.

We also encourage you to watch a very important tutorial we posted recently from another post-processing expert, in which you’ll learn the best way to organize your Lightroom catalog for maximum efficiency so you never lose a photo again.