Apply Coloured Eye Shadow

Adding make-up is a tricky aspect to master when editing in Photoshop and Elements. Get it right, and you enhance the natural beauty of your subject, with simple and creative brushing techniques. Get it wrong, and it can look clown-like and unnatural. There’s a fine line between the two, and sometimes just 10% Opacity.

Applying make-up can be fun and artistic, though. Any colour is workable, and you can give a subject a completely different feel by trying out different shades. It’s also something that you can do no matter what the picture style is; if you’re creating a fantasy composition, you might want to choose ethereal hues for the make-up, and if you’re creating a science-fiction character, you might want to play with electric, neon-like colours.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of make-up, you can then move on to even more advanced edits. Let’s take a look at how to add make-up on your pictures; you could save yourself a lot of time getting ready with this tutorial.

1. Brush some colour
   Start off by picking a shade that you want to use on your subject. We’ve gone for a deep green to complement the hair colour, but you can choose any colour at all. Create a new layer, and with a soft brush, paint the colour between the eye and the eyebrow.
2. Apply Gaussian Blur
   Lower the opacity of the coloured layer you’ve just painted, so that you can see how it looks in relation to the face – any value will do right now; we’ll correct the opacity next. On another new layer, paint a second shade, perhaps a slightly different hue to the last one.
3. Set opacity
   It’s vital to keep the make-up subtle. Tone down your first shade to 10% Opacity and your second to 20%. Anything more than this, and it will look obvious that themake-up isn’t real. Youmight even want to add a third layer with another hue at low opacity.
4. Mask to perfection
   Subtlety is the key with applying make-up, so with all this eye-shadow colour applied, the last thing is to tidy it up. Mask the layers and with a big, black, soft brush, erase the sides so the colour looks like it flows naturally.