Hello
I went on my first safari in South Africa and a friend loaned me a
D60 and some lenses. This is my first real attempt at photography
(digital or film!) but I got what I think is a lovely image here.
The thing is, I want to touch up the eyes so they don't have that
reflection effect. I don't really know how best to achieve this,
can anyone give me some tips?
It is a nice shot. Actually, I think the eyelight adds to the picture: you should just tone it down a bit so it wouldn't jump out like that. Do you have Photoshop or some other image editing software? It's easy with that.
I'd do it this way:
1. Copy and paste the entire image into a second layer (so if I screw up I can start over easily)
2. Zoom in to 200% on the eye.
3. Pick the Magic Wand tool, and click on the eyelight.
4. If all of it didn't get selected (or too much got selected), adjust Tolerance up (or down), and try again.
5. Set Feather to 2px (at a guess, basically the "radius of softness" in the image).
6. If necessary, go Selection: Expand (or Contract) until an area that extend just beyond the eyelight is selected.
7. Hide the marching ants.
8. Select Curves. Then pull down the curve until the eyelight is at the right brightness relative to the rest of the image.
9. Select Adjust: Hue/Saturation/Lightness, and pull down the Saturation until it looks right relative to the rest of the image.
10. Click on the little icon that looks like a dotted-line circle at the bottom of the Layers/Channels palette to create a quick mask. (See Help about this for more info.)
11. Control-D to deselect.
12. Look at the borders of the highlight: do they blend in nicely with the rest of the image? If not, use a small brush or small eraser to adjust the mask.
13. Merge.
You might also want to adjust levels and curves on the entire picture, but that's another story...
Petteri
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http://www.seittipaja.fi/index/ 
