When it comes to major retouching like changing eye color, most of us choose to use Photoshop or a similar pixel editor rather than a RAW editor like Lightroom. But as Anthony Morganti shows in the tutorial above, you don’t actually have to leave Lightroom to make this kind of edit.
In this quick tutorial, Morganti shows you two ways to get a reasonably realistic result when changing eye color in Adobe Lightroom. After desaturating the eyes completely with a local adjustment brush, you can either:
- Select your own color and paint it on using a second local adjustment, or
- Use this eyedropper trick to ‘steal’ the color from another portrait, and then use that as your new eye color.
Morganti shares two examples. Using the first method, he changes a person’s brown eyes to a cyan-blue that he selected; then, using the second method, he “replaces” a person’s blue eyes with the brown color from the first portrait example.
If you wan to learn how to do this yourself, check out the full video up top. It’s a very simple edit, and there are definitely more advanced methods for achieving a more realistic result, but now you know how to do it in Lightroom or your RAW editor of choice.
(via DIY Photography)