Tutorial Change Eyes Effect Using Photoshop

Here’s what the eyes will look like when we’re done:

Here’s a close-up view just to see the effect more clearly:

Let’s get started!

Let’s start with the eye on the left of the photo. We’ll go through the steps needed to create the effect in one eye, then it’s simply a matter of repeating the same steps for the other eye. To begin, select Photoshop’s Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools panel along the left of the screen. By default, it’s hiding behind the Rectangular Marquee Tool. To access it, click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool’s icon and hold your mouse button down for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears showing the other tools that are available in that same spot. Choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the list:

We’ll use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to draw a selection around the iris (the colored part of the eye). In my photo, the upper part of the woman’s iris is covered by her eyelid, so to select it with the Elliptical Marquee Tool, we’ll need to use a couple of different selection modes, as we’ll see in a moment.

First, I’ll zoom in on the eye a little bit by pressing and holding Ctrl+spacebar (Win) / Command+spacebar (Mac) on my keyboard, which temporarily switches me to the Zoom Tool, and clicking a few times on the eye. Once you’ve zoomed in, release the keys to automatically switch back to the previous tool (the Elliptical Marquee Tool, in this case):

With the Elliptical Marquee Tool in hand, I’ll drag out an elliptical selection outline around the iris, ignoring for the moment that the top of my selection is extending up into the eyelid. To reposition the selection outline as you’re drawing it, press and hold your spacebar, drag the selection outline into position, then release your spacebar and continue dragging. Don’t worry if you select a little bit of the white area around the iris as well. We can easily remove it later:

To remove the part of the selection that extends over the eyelid, we’ll need to switch selection modes. By default, the Elliptical Marquee Tool is set to the New Selection mode, which means it will draw a brand new selection every time we use it. That’s usually what we want, but not in this case. We need the Intersect With Selection mode which we can switch to by clicking on its icon in the Options Bar along the top of the screen:

A small “x” will appear in the lower right of my mouse cursor letting me know I’m in the Intersect With Selection mode. With the initial selection still active, I’ll click and drag out a second selection around just the part of the initial selection I want to keep, which is everything except for the top area that extends over the eyelid. Notice that the top of my second selection is now cutting off the unwanted top area of my initial selection. Again, to reposition this second selection as you’re drawing it, press and hold the spacebar on your keyboard, drag the selection outline into position, then release your spacebar and continue dragging:

With my second selection outline in place, I’ll release my mouse button, and because I was in the Intersect With Selection mode, Photoshop keeps only the part of the initial selection that was surrounded by the second selection. The unwanted top area over the eyelid is now gone:

Related tutorial: Unlock The Full Power Of Basic Selections In Photoshop

Next, we’ll copy our selection to a new layer. Press the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key on your keyboard and, while still holding the key down, go up to the Layer menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen, choose New, then choose Layer via Copy:

Holding down the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key as we select New Layer via Copy tells Photoshop to pop open the New Layer dialog box for us so we can name the new layer before it’s added. Name the layer “left eye”. Leave all the other options set to their defaults:

Click OK when you’re done to close out of the dialog box. Nothing will seem to have happened in the document (except that the selection outline will disappear), but if we look in the Layers panel, we see that our selection is now sitting on its own "left eye" layer directly above the original image on the Background layer: