Changing Eye Color In Paint Shop Pro XI

Objective: To demonstrate the ease of changing eye color in photographs to achieve a more natural and realistic appearance.

Tools Used: Selection Tool, Circle, Alpha Channel, Flood Fill Tool, Warp Brush

Palettes Used: Tool Options Palette, Tools Toolbar, Materials Palette

Effects Used: Feather selection, contract selection, edit selection, Dodge, Opacity

Types of Layers Used: Raster Layer

There are several different methods for changing the eye color on photographs. Most of them rely on placing an adjustment layer on top of the original photo, then modifying the Hue and Saturation. Unfortunately, this one works only on the lighter colors such as blue or green. Most of the examples on line will show you how to do this if the subject's eyes are open. For the purpose of this tutorial so you can see the full effect we're going to do the same thing.

But what do you do if the they have their eyes partially closed? Or the eyes appear uneven in size? The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce you to another tool that will give you much more precision in working around the eyes, whether partially open or not while at the same time providing a much more natural appearance to the final photograph.

Step 1

On the Tools toolbar, select the Selection Tool (S)

On the Tool Options palette, Selection type: Circle

For this tutorial, you will need a photograph. There are several resources available online to find photographs. Because of their wide selection, our personal choice is Fotosearch.com.

Let's begin by opening your photograph:

Since we're going to working on the eyes, we'll zoom in to make working on them much easier. We want to be able to work on both eyes at the same time, so you don't want to make your image to large. Now, you can either use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out, or On the Tools toolbar, click on Zoom In a few times until your comfortable with the size:

The first thing we're going to do here is to create the selection around the eyes. Don't worry about making the selections to large, we'll fix that in the next step.

Now we're going to select the other eye.

Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard. The purpose of this is to add the new selection to our current one. If you don't do this, when you create your new selection, you'll loose the first one.

Create your second selection:

Next we want to remove the center portion around the iris itself. To do this, we're going to change keyboard buttons from the Shift key (add) to the Ctrl key (remove).

While holding down on your Ctrl key on your keyboard, starting as close to the center of the iris as possible, remove a smaller amount of the selection:

Make sure that you have done this with both eyes.

Step 2

On the Tools toolbar, select the Warp Brush

On the Tool Options palette, set Warp modes: Push and the Size should be slightly larger then the selection itself. Here are my settings:

Choose Selections > Edit Selection, or click the Edit Selection button on the Layers palette.

You'll notice that your selections are now a salmon color:

Using the warp brush, we can reshape our selections more precisely around the eyes. To do this, I'm going to zoom in real close to my first selection and start pushing the selection into shape:

Before:	After:

Again, make sure that you have done this with both eyes.

Now we'll take the selection out of edit mode.

Choose Selections > Edit Selection, or click the Edit Selection button on the Layers palette.

The end result of coloring changing should be as unnoticeable and natural looking as possible. For this effect to work we're going to modify our selection just a bit.

Selections > Modify > Contract...> Number of pixels:1 > OK

and smooth it out

Selections > Modify > Feather...> Number of pixels:2 > OK

At this point, you can save the selection to the Alpha channel if you want to experiment with different colors later on.

Selections > Load/Save Selection > Save Selection To Alpha Channel... > Save

Step 3

Now the fun part, applying the color(s)

Layers > New Raster Layer... > Ok

On the Materials palette, set your Foreground color to bright green (#00ff00)

On the Tools toolbar, select the Flood Fill Tool (F) and fill the selections.

Selections > Select None

On the Layers palette, set the Blend Mode to Dodge and lower the Opacity down to the desired level. This is my current settings:

And my final result:

For those that want to try another color, rather than start from the beginning, simply turn off the visibility on the current layer and add a new layer

On the Layers palette, set the Visibility Toggle to off:

Layers > New Raster Layer... > Ok

Selections > Load/Save Selection > Load Selection From Alpha Channel... > Load

On the Materials palette, select a new Foreground color

On the Tools toolbar, select the Flood Fill Tool (F) and fill the selections.

Apply the same layer effect.

Selections > Select None

On the Layers palette, set the Blend Mode to Dodge and lower the Opacity down to the desired level.

Examples