How to Change Eye Color with Photoshop

Posted on Sep 09, 2009 in Tutorials

For whatever reason, you may want to change someone’s iris color, so here’s how to do so in just a few minutes with Photoshop.

We’ll be using this stock from asilwen for this tutorial.

Step 1.

Here’s the original stock. We will be changing the eye color to brown for this tutorial, but other colors will work fine as well.

Step 2.

Take a hard brush and brush around the eye. Try to stay in the iris area, and you don’t need to color over the pupil, because we don’t want all the extra coloring on the lighting anyways.

Step 3.

Now obviously this doesn’t look right, so we’ll change the settings a bit. Set the layer blending mode to “Color” and then erase with a soft brush over some of the pupil and around the outsides so everything that doesn’t look good and natural is gone. It’s better to erase too much than to color outside the lines in this case.

Step 4.

The eye color seems brown enough, but for brown eyes, it’s a bit too bright, so duplicate the layer and then hit control+u to open the layer hue/saturation options. Darken it all the way.

Step 5.

Now just change the layer blending mode to “Soft Light,” and fix anything that stands out too much. You’re done!

A perfect transition of eye colors to a different color. Here’s another example, with a blue color instead of brown.

For the blue, there was no darkening layer, and the blue layer was set on color at 50% opacity.

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Tags: Change, Color, Eye, how to, Photoshop