Exercise: Enhancement.

Outline: Use a close up head-and-shoulders portrait, in available or natural lighting and without using flash. Make two selections, one at a time, each with it's own adjustment. First should be of the entire face and the second just of the eyes.

Looking through my image library I came across this image:

original

Ok, so firstly i used the magnetic lasso tool in photoshop elements around the little boys face, ears and neck:

Select face with magnetic lasso

I included the neck and ears so that it would look more realistic than just lightening the face itself. So then I just increased the brightness and increased the contrast to these areas:

Dodging to the facial area

And now we can see the selected areas have been emphasized to draw more attention to the face than before. I then reverted back to the original image and, one at a time, selected the eyes. Firstly, I selected the iris and as suggested in the notes, increased the saturation and brightness. Then I altered the hue to change the eye colour. Finally, I selected the whole eye (iris and the white of the eye) and increased the brightness and contrast to bring out the eyes even more.

Eye colour changed & eyes made more noticeable

 Yes, I am aware that the red eyes is not a natural eye colour but this is part of the reason why I chose it. And also, when dabbling with the hue setting, this colour was the one that actually looked most 'realistic' (ironically) as some of the other colours just didn't appear real.

Conclusion: 
I enjoyed this exercise, tampering within the realms of photographic reality. I am fully for the altering the face lightening because as I have said in the previous exercises, altering lighting and drawing attention to a subject I dont feel is misleading the viewer. Altering the eye colour, for me, is on the other end of the scale as we are altering the actual subject. That is why I chose the red eyes for my exercise above, because red is not a natural eye colour and by looking at the above image, it is blatantly obvious that the image has been tampered with and the viewer will know that straight away. I dont believe that misleading the viewer for 'profit' if you like is right. A portrait of someone, yes by all means brighten their eyes to highlight them as a beautiful feature but to highlight them in an advertising campaign to sell 'eye brightening' product?? Not at all.