Here is another potential tutorial thread for the purpose of demonstrating how I typically add glowing eyes to my figures using Photoshop CS3. More examples of this technique and its results can be seen in this post: http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/trans...ese-few-my-favorite-things-7.html#post6008894

Step 1: Import your photo into Photoshop

That's it; you're done with this step!




Step 2: Selecting the eyes

Use the Polygonal Lasso tool to manually trace around each eye. Make sure you have "Add to selection" selected in the toolbar, so both eyes can be selected at the same time, and therefore modified simultaneously. Do not worry too much about precision or smoothness; a rough outline is acceptable so long as you're within the eyes.




Step 3: Refining the selection

With the eyes still selected, and before you do anything else, click the "Refine Edge..." button in the toolbar. This will bring up the menu below. This will allow us to make the eyes look more natural, and not cut-and-pasted. You can mouse over each of the sliders to read what they do in the description box below. These setting will depend on the size of your image, so don't necessarily copy the settings in the picture below.

The three most important settings here are Smooth, Feather and Contract/Expand. Smooth gets rid of sharp edges from the initial Lassoing. Feather blurs the edges of the selection, which will enhance the glowing effect when we get to that step. Finally, Contract/Expand will help to make the eyes "fit" into the face better; a small contraction of -1 to -4% can help to make the glowing effect look more convincing.

Once you're happy with the selection, copy and paste the selection to a new layer. You should now have the entire photo on a single layer and the eyes on a new layer on top.




Step 4: Color overlay

On the new eyes layer, Right click --> Blending Options.... Check the box next to Color Overlay, and navigate to that tab. All we're going to do here is completely color the eyes in white, as you see in the picture below. This is the first time you'll get a sense of what you did in step 3. If you're unhappy with the way it looks, go back and play around with the settings again.




Step 5: Outer glow

While you're in Blending Options..., check off the Outer Glow box and navigate to that tab. For this step, you can change all of your settings to what you see in the picture below. The only things you will need to change are the color, and the Spread and Size sliders. As in Refine Edges..., you'll want to play with these to see how they work, but in general, set Spread first to determine the extent of the glow, and then use Size to help blur it. For small photos, don't be surprised if the Spread ends up being 0. The trick is getting the glow to tight to the eyes, but not so close that it looks like eyeliner.

Once you're satisfied with the result, hit Ok: you're done!




Step --: Refine Edge...

For comparison's sake, this is what the final result would have looked like, with the same Outer Glow, if you hadn't used the Refine Edge... button.




Conclusion

And in context, this is the result.




At this point, you may feel the need to go back and try it again. Ultimately you'll end up with something you like. In this case, I thought the eyes looked better being a little larger and less blurred - a result of tweaking the Feather and Contract/Expand sliders in Refine Edge....




As a final note: don't forget that the layer effects are live settings. That is, if you resize this image, the Blending Options will not resize with it. Before you do any resizing, save a flattened copy of your work file out, i.e., *.jpg. Do any resizing you need to in this new file.