This is the original photo. Looks great, but I want the eyes to pop more without going in and brightening them. An easy way to make them look more eyecatching is to sharpen them in Photoshop. I usually sharpen all of my photos to add interest to them, and because I like clarity in my photos. Overdoing the sharpening can make a photo look messy or like it has a lot of artifacts. That’s why I prefer to use the masking tool to selectively sharpen bits of my photos.

For reference, I’m just using plain ol’ Adobe Photoshop CS.

Go into Quick Mask Mode, which can be accessed by clicking that button.

Fill your canvas with an opaque black and it’ll show up as a translucent red over your image.

Then grab the brush and change your brush color to white. What you paint with white will be selected, while the black will not be selected. To have a nice smooth transition from unsharpened areas to sharpen, I like to use a soft, large brush at a lower opacity and build up layers as I paint. As you can see, I concentrated on the eyes, mouth, and the heart pendant.

Click this button to get out of Quick Mask Mode, and what you painted will now be selected.

I prefer to use Unsharp Mask.

Then I play around with the settings to see what I like.

The finished product.

A comparison. The effect is subtle, but I think it’s worth the effort.