OKay I think Im almost there..

[kimberley]

Im trying to learn how to make the eyes pop...here is my first attempt....

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Do you have model lights on your units? If you do turn them on, it will shrink the iris a bit more and may give you a bit more pop in the photos.
BTW cute kid!

[Silvernic]

Originally Posted by DEMDeepEllumMusic

Do you have model lights on your units? If you do turn them on, it will shrink the iris a bit more and may give you a bit more pop in the photos.
BTW cute kid!

And here I thought those model lights were just annoying and useless. Thanks for the tip!

[kimberley]

I wish I had lights!!!!!!!!! this is available light from a window in my bedroom....cool you thought I had light though......

K

[Silvernic]

Wow, that is impressive use of window light!

[photosbymorgan2]

Very nice.

My suggestions are to remove the less catch light and tweak the blue in the eyes. And the iris would not get any smaller if it was indoor light. The outside light already caused them to shrink enough to see the nice blue in the eyes. And I like the darkness on the outer edge of the eyeballs. If you look at glamour magazines you will see the dark outer edge and they sometimes put it there in post processing to make the eyes stand out more.

[srwatters]

Your's looks nice, but I see a shift in skin tone from before to after. Did you make other adjustments? It looks like it went from pink to yellow in tint.

My simple method for eyes is like so:
use quick mask mode with masking the selection and not the rest of the image
use a brush with about 20% harndess and paint the iris and pupil area
switch back to normal mode from quick mask
apply usm to the selected eyes (150%, 1.5, 8)

I vary the radius and threshold depending on the iris color and sharpness of the original image and the effect I want. Works well for me

Really cute kid and capture too!