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  2. Techniques

Enhancing Your Pet’s Eyes

Intro by Skip Cohen

It’s downtime for just about everybody right now, but that doesn’t mean your skillset has to be put on hold. Looking through Nicole Begley’s archives I ran across this short post and video about the eyes in a pet portrait.

So many of you have dogs. In fact, there’s been post after post, shared on Facebook of photographers and their pups, myself included. And while many of you aren’t pet photographers, you’ve got the time to enhance your skillset.

I know many of the images being shared are grab-shots meant to make a point more than a portrait. But, if as a professional photographer you’re going to share your images in public, now and then you might as well make them the best they can be.

Plus, in terms of your skills – the hierarchy of why people hire a professional photographer goes brides, babies, pets! There are over 90 million dogs owned in the United States and a market continually growing!


By Nicole Begley

We’ve all heard that the eyes are the window to the soul, but often those eyes come straight out of the camera all sorts of unremarkable.  The key is enhancing a dog’s eyes in post-production, whether you use Photoshop or Lightroom.

In this video, I’m sharing my workflow for creating eyes that come to life and sparkle, and I do that in Photoshop CC.  You can absolutely use Lightroom to create the same effect, it’s completely up to you and your workflow.  If you do use Photoshop and would like to use the high pass action that I created to get this look, you can download it here.

EYES STRAIGHT OUT OF CAMERA:

EYES AFTER ENHANCEMENT: