In any portrait, the eyes are the most important element. Keep this in mind even for photos of people for your Web site. Whether it's a portrait of your kids for the family blog or of your staff on your small business Web site, the eyes draw the viewer in, revealing much about the subject's mood and personality.

To focus your audience even more on a subject's eyes, try using the following tricks to boost eye color, brightness, and sparkle.

Always do this kind of retouching work on a duplicate layer. In Elements, you can copy just the eyes to a new layer by selecting the eye area and then pressing Ctrl+J.

• Boost the saturation of the iris: In Elements, use the Sponge tool. Choose a very small, soft brush, set the Mode control on the Options bar to Saturate, and click all the way around the iris. Don't overdo — you don't want the eye color to look unnatural.
• Brighten the whites of the eyes: Dab at the whites of the eyes with the Dodge tool, also labeled in the figure. Which Range setting you use depends on the original eye, so you need to do some experimenting here. Again, don't go too far. You just want to make the whites slightly lighter, not glow-in-the-dark bright.
• If the eyes are bloodshot, your best bet is to clone good portions of the eye over the blood vessels.
• Sharpen the eyeball: To make the eyes sparkle, pick up the Sharpen tool. Choose a soft brush that's slightly larger than the size of the eyeball. Then click once or twice to sharpen just that area.

If your photo editor doesn't offer a Saturation, Dodge, or Sharpen tool, you can select the portion of the eye that you want to alter and then use the program's standard saturation, exposure, and sharpening filters to make these changes.