Okay let us move on to accenting the irises of the eyes. So I am going to hold down my Spacebar and that toggles my hand but if I add the Control key on a PC, Command key on the Mac so that is Spacebar and Command or Control, I can actually click and drag a Marquee so that the image zooms in to the area that I want to play with. And I am going to get the Elliptical Marquee Tool which is hidden under the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Toolbox. And I am just going to draw a loose selection around this iris and the holding shift constrains it to a perfect circle and if I also add the Spacebar—temporarily hold the Spacebar, I can reposition this circle release the Spacebar, still holding onto the Shift and just stretch it out to catch that.

Now I want to add to this selection because I want to get this eye as well. And I can do that by playing finger aerobics here or I can simply go up to the top options bar and there are four little icons up here. And the first one is to start a selection and the second one means, add to the selection. So I can click on that and that is going to know that I want to add to the selection and note the little plus sign next to the crosshair cursor. So I do not have to hold any modifier keys down to do this. Except the Shift key to constrain it to a circle and then again I can hold down the Spacebar again to just move that over a little bit.

So now I have both of the irises selected and it does not matter that they are not perfect because again what we are doing is creating the selection to preselect and create mask for us on our next adjustment layer. And since this tutorial is specifically honing in on the levels adjustment layer so you will get to know this particular color adjustment and how to mix colors, we will leave that selection running but before we go get it we are going to put this back to new selection.

This little helper icons up here are stickies so you always want to remember to go back to the default otherwise that can mess you up at a later time when you are trying to do something. So we will just put that back on the first icon there. And then I am going to come down here to levels, let me move my layers pallet over here. And we have to ask ourselves a question. What are we trying to do with the eyes?

Well I am trying to bring out a little bit more brownish red color in the eyes and the problem with working on dark pixels is you have to think a little differently while it is very easy to change the color of eyes or any type of items that sort of have a middle luminosity. You know up around 128 or actually probably down from about 70, you know on up to about 230, those are ideal that that type of luminosity to apply color to. But when you have got pixels that fall in that lower range of luminosity in order to change the color, you have to think in terms of a enlightening the pixels up so that it can accepts the color so, we are going to go into levels and I will show you how to that.

Okay. So go into levels here and in order to lighten something over all, we are wanted to go to the gamma slider here and remember the process moving to the left will lighten things up. Now do not worry that it looks kind of yucky like this. We are going to change that with some blending modes and later in the opacity we will be able to fix that. So let me just lighten it up maybe to about 1.87, right here, 1.87. And then we can go in and we want to add a little bit of red to that brown and remember in levels if you want to get this color you can move that midpoint slider to the left and it is going to introduce some of that color.

You can also come down here to output levels that will overall redden something and go the opposite way with the black point output level slider if you move this it turns it real red. But we are just going for the midpoint slider here to effect here these colors here. So I am just adding a little bit of red here and I am going to add a little bit of yellow. Now remember yellow is controlled in a blue channel because it the complementary color of blue and since it is a complement, we move to the right to introduce a little bit of that yellow. And we can come back in here and edit that a little bit in a minute here.

So I am just going to click OK with this. And I am going to play with some blending modes here. And one that kind of draws out things is linear dodge. So I am going to do that. So see all the little sparklies there. Of course this is too garish but we have this wonderful layer opacity to control that with. And so I am just going to lower this probably just to about here and I am going to flip the visibility on and off because I do not want to make to drastic the color to change. I just want to pop in and you know some little sparklies.

And now, I can go in and clean up this mask and what I am going to do here is I need to knock out where the pupil is on that selection. So this time, I am going to go and get a hardedge brush so, I will just pick a hard round 19 and come out in my document window and adjust the size using my left to right bracket keys. I want it bigger so, I am using my right bracket key. And since I want to hide that effect, I need to press my X key so that my foreground color switches to black. And so I will just tap that once and I will come over here tap this over here.

And then I am going to just blur the mask to make this blend a little better. So I will go under Filter, Blur, Gaussian blur. In blurring the pixels, it is just blurring that mask a little bit. And click OK. And then click the visibility icon next to this new layer which we are going to name Iris so we know what it is. Click it off and on. So it is a little subtle difference. I am going to come back and get my airbrush again. This airbrush soft round and then we start out with the 200 and I will just make a little bit smaller and I will come in here and just kind of tap and clean up this area with a soft edge brush right now.

I am going to Alt click on the mask so that you can see how the mask looks. Alt click to look at the image again so, by preselecting with the selection tool it created those initial circles for us and now we got a little bit more sparkly in the eye and just take this off because it should be a little darker and just to settle little pop. The next thing that we are going to do is brighten up the eye whites.

So again what I am going to do here is just go back to the old fashion way that we did it or if you like can use a Quick Mask to kind of paint this in. In fact let us do that because we need to practice that. So I am going to hit the letter Q to toggle into Quick Mask mode and that does not really change anything that you are seeing right now but when you go to paint which I am going to do right here, it is painting it with a Quick Mask and again that is by default in red and I am going to just undo that right now and come in here cause I see that I have—since this is a new session I have not check my preferences.

So we come over to the toolbox and double click on the Quick Mask icon. And what the areas that we are painting in this instance to represent the selected areas. The selected areas are the areas that we want to affect with the change. And I am just going to leave it red for right now since I am not working on the skin, I do not really need to change this to the emerald leaf will leave in ruby leaf mode for right now. And click OK. I just wanted to make sure that that radial button said selected areas. This is real important folks for this method.

So I will just come in here and just paint a little bit of red and this white areas and again I do not have to be too concerned with how accurate it is at this point because it is going to just preselect the mask which I can then later edit but I am just cleaning it up a little bit right here.

Continue to part eight of this series.