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Thursday 4th February 2010 - Tutorial on how to manipulate the eyes of toys etc with Photoshop

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Recently there have been a number of people asking for information on why the Uglydolls which live with Myself and Mireille have movable and closable eyes, short answer is that they don't - we simply manipulate the eyes in the image with Photoshop (or you could do the same with any other decent software package).

So, to try and make it easier to understand how I get this effect, lets have some fun with Ice-Bat...

So, original image first off:-

First up we want to zoom in to have the eyes big enough on the screen that we can work with them easily and get a nice clean line where we're going to make the changes (i.e. so it doesn't look rough and nasty).

Once you're zoomed in you then need to choose whichever selection tool you prefer using (in the case of these eyes with two very different colours the magnetic lasso tool works quite well), but I normally go with the Polygonal Lasso Tool as it then means that I define all the points in the area I choose to work with.

Select the entire white area inside of the eye using the lasso tool you chose above, and then I normally zoom right in on that eye to get a good idea of how the work I'm about to do looks.

It's always good to keep the original image intact and only mess around with extra layers, that way if you bodge something up you can simply delete that layer and do it all over again until you get it right, so to pull the area we're going to work on just do a COPY and PASTE (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) and hey presto you have a new layer with only the inner part of the eye shown.

As you've now pasted this into a new layer, you need to once again select it, so go to the Select menu and choose the Reselect option (so you should now have 2 layers shown with the new layer having the inner eye on it and marching ants around the section you copied - to show that this is the only area you can physically modify on this layer.

Now the fun really begins, select the clone stamp tool, and the original background layer and then I normally make the size of the area I want to pull the information from around 1/4 of the size of the eye itself and try to pick an area close to the eye that you can keep a decent colour which will flow into the eye from the surrounding area (i.e. you don't want a massive colour change to be shown, it has to blend in).

Once you're happy with the area you want to clone from, hold down the Alt key and left click the mouse. You've now got that area defined as where you're going to clone from. Select the new layer you copied only the eye to and then click in the centre of the eye - you should see something like this...

Then this is where you'll understand why I told you to reselect the eye in the new layer earlier on - now you simply keep adding the colour to the eye and it will only show up inside that selected area (giving you a nice clean line). Once you've filled in the whole eye it should look like this...

So all that's left for the closed eye now is to make the line across to show that the IS closed, that's an easy one. First off lets make another new layer (menu selection for this is Layer > New > Layer) - then select the line tool followed by choosing the original background layer once again. Select the colour palette and use the ink dropper tool to select an area of the black outer surround of the eye you're working on - that way it will blend in nicely with the original once again.

Reselect your newest layer (layer 2 unless you renamed it), deselect the eye outline by Select > Deselect in the menu's and then simply draw your line across the eye in whichever way you want.

Click on the original background layer now to see how the pic looks with nothing selected, and if you're happy then choose Layer > Merge Visible from the menu's.

You'll be left with one single layer again with all your work above added.

Then just zoom out to see how it looks.

Likewise you can use the same sort of technique for a half-closed eye

Or if you're looking to do the simple option and move the eye to look in a particular direction, simply select the black section of the eye, copy it to a new layer, move it to where you want and then use the clone stamp tool to tidy up the centre area where the eye originally was.

So from myself and Ice-Bat, we hope this makes sense and you find it easy enough to follow ;)