Tutorial: werewolf eyes
After having been asked to make a tutorial on how I make my edits of werewolf eyes me and Victoria Argent are now here to talk to you about this matter.
First of all, two things about choosing what to edit:
The better you see the eyes and the clearer they are and the more detail they have in the original, the better you will be able to edit them. If they are obscured it will make it harder for you to set the parameters right and to color them properly.
The less the eyes move throughout your gif, the easier it will be for you in the beginning. The more a character looks around or blinks, the more work it will be and the more things can go wrong. It will look smoother the less their eyes move.
Victoria spying on Scott and Allison in Raving gives us both. Thank you Victoria.
First things you have to do (or should do) are color and edit, resize, sharpen and reduce to an amount of frames that will not make your gif be too big to upload in the end. I'll not explain how to do any of this in this tutorial, but you will find plenty of guides and that is probably not the reason you're reading this anyway. So, after doing all of this, I ended up with this.
Let's get going.
eye color
You should add new folder above all the layers you already have. (in case you want to make a gif) In that folder (which I name like the frame it is used to color) you create a new layer, set it to the mode "color" and color the eyes of the character in your gif.
I do that with the pencil tool. You might have to try a bit until you have a color that you like (I tried for about two days).
light
To make the eyes stand out and look supernatural rather than just weirdly colored we will add a light effect. I worked on this for some time until I had it how I wanted it and this is the part that should be adjusted to every edit.
Add another folder Inside the folder in which the layer that adjust the color of the eyes lies. It should be above the one that adjusts eye color. Set the mode of this folder to "Color Dodge". Add a layer in this folder and choose the color white and the gradient tool set to "radial gradient". It should also be set to "foreground to transparent".
With these settings color the area above the eye.
One layer per eye is enough for now.
adjusting the light layers
Since now the light probably doesn't yet make it look like and illuminates more than just the color, we need to adjust those layers.
Add a layer mask to the folder that holds the previously added layers. Fill it completely black. The light effect will vanish from your gif. You can now take a white pencil and paint over where the eye is to make those layers visible again in these areas. If you make too much visible you can always switch your pencil color to black and correct. This ended up looking like this in the case of our Victoria Argent gif.
It's easily adjustable to other layers without much effort if you do it this way.
Another thing that makes eyes stand out and look unreal is sharp edges. I use the blur tool to blur the edges on this layer mask and make it look smoother.
Now you can intensify the light by duplicating the light effect layers or changing opacity. Once you're satisfied with how it looks you need to do this for the rest of the frames (in case it's a gif).
And you should be done.