How To Brighten Eyes in Lightroom

Have you ever received or taken a photograph where your subject's eye is too dark or in shadow?
How do you fix this issue and what tools does lightroom give you? This article will go over some of the handy tools that Adobe Lightroom gives users to adjust and tweak edits like these and help explain why you might want to do this in your edits.

Why do you want to brighten the eyes in the lightroom?

Sometimes when a photograph is taken in a high contrast area such as in direct sunlight or in dark rooms with high beaming LED lights the eyes may not be well lit.

Photographs taken in high contrast where the light changes rapidly throughout the image. Changes fast, reflect off and give a sharp look on the skin, eyes are at a lower depth then the rest of the face. Cheeks may have highlights while the eye sockets and eyes will be darker.

By brightening up the eyes you can create a well balanced photograph and communicate your intended message.

Why are the eyes important?

The eyes are an important focus point for other people. When you are talking with someone you may look into their eyes occasionally. In photographs it is no different. You can communicate with them which is why it is important to create a good exposure for them. When you look at a composition of an eye you gravitate towards the eye.

An example of one piece of work is the Mona Lisa where a vivid focal point are the eyes.

Eyes can communicate so much as human to humans and animals to other animals. This can bring up mood, attitudes and assist your piece of work that you have in mind.

[ Exposure determines the amount of brightness in a given photograph. The lower the exposure, the darker the image. The higher or additional exposure, the brighter the image will be. ]If you can vision the composition and the layout you may want to include the eye formulation in the distinction between the viewer, the photograph and your role in the creation or being part of a composition or work of art.

I have a piece of work , how do I fix this?

Now although this article is intended for lightroom users there are plenty of other desktop software and mobile applications that allow you to create the same effect.
The main idea is to translate these. Smartphone apps such as Adobe Lightroom, SnapSeed, Photoshop are great substitutes to this effect. Desktop Applications may include Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Capture One or Skylum.

Lets begin with some tools that lightroom has that can help you.

Lets start off with this Photography of Julia for Lorina Sparkling Soda.

This image was taken in direct sunlight.

1 . The first step you can do to figure out what you can change about the eyes is individually cropping the area to where just the eye. [R] To crop This will allow you to use the histogram to visualize what is going on with the light and the color channels as you do this.

Terms:
Histogram - Helps identify the spread of light throughout the image. The Left hand side is the shadows, the right hand sand represents the highlights. Learn more here.

Color Channels - The most common ones are the RGB Red green blue channels. These are also found in the histogram as well as split channels like magenta and yellow. Learn more here.

2. The next step is using a selective brush that will allow you to find the specific area where you would like to use the brush. You can press [K] on your keyboard to bring this up.

The Brush setting includes a few different ways of selecting to define the brush in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 2022.

3. Next step is to get the irisand the white part of the eye in a selection for one of the eyes. It is recommended to do one eye at a time and match settings or adjust them. This way if one eye is darker then the other you can adjust them individually instead of together.

On the bottom of the menu you can check if there is a color overlay or not. I would recommend putting it on during this process so you don’t select an area outside of the eye.

There are a couple of ways to brighten the eye.

4. The first way is to change the highlights and the shadows of the image.You can bring the highlights and white up for the image in the Basic Module Tab. For example adding +43 onto the highlights will only affect the highlights. Which is why it is a preferred way to brighten the eyes.

Highlights- Brightest part of an image
White - Above the brightness part of an image 5. The second way is to use the full exposure to bring up the entire brightness of the eye. This can be great if all of it is underexposed and nothing is in the highlights (from the histogram point of view).

Using the exposure setting will simultaneously way the white, black, highlights and shadows all together. If you bring it up it will shift the histogram to the left and make the image brighter. If you bring the exposure down, it will shift the histogram to the right.

Additional Questions:

Will you be doing Dodge and Burn Tutorial soon?

Yes! There will be future articles based on the dodge and burn tool in photoshop. The Dodge and burn tool are very useful for adding highlights and shadows to your image.

There is a white overlay when I use the brush, how do I fix this?

There are a few things possible in this situation. One situation is that the saturation of the brush is too low. The second possibility is that there is a white overlay over the brush area.

You can also look at the Show Edit Pins ribbon and go over to the Overlay mode.

The overlay mode will give you 4 different options-Color Overlay - This will give you a colored selection over the brush.
Color Overlay on B&W - This will give a colored selection with a black and white background.
Images on B&W - This will give a real selection with a black and white background
Images on Black - This will give a real image selection with a black background
Images on White - This will give a real image selection with a white background
White on Black - This will give a white selection with a black background
[img]color-overlay.How do you change the color overlay?
In the Overlay Mode you can also the Color Overlay.
After having the color overlay selected you can go to the top of Lightroom
Then to tools > Mask Overlay > Color Overlay Settings.
After selecting it you should get a module tab that shows the RGB selector.
You can use the eyedropper tool to select the desired color and the opacity of choice.