CS2 help

I've seen some pics lately that the eyes of the subject have been made to stand out through photoshop. I have no idea how to do this, but I would love to learn. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Just have to follow on this one

Well, when photographing people you should always focus on the eyes. That's a good start.
Then you can do things like create a merged copy in a new layer and apply sharpening to the image.
Then hold ALT and add a layer mask (so that the mask is created in black hiding the effect) and paint with white on the mask around the eyes to selectively sharpen them.

I'm not sure what you mean by "stand out" so there could be other methods.

Adding an omni light rendered effect can help draw focus in on people's faces. Be gentle and use about 25 strength... then drop the light layer's opacity really low until it looks natural.

Perhaps you could show some samples of images that you're refering to.

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=126455

About midway through this thread, the picture, and subject comes up.

Just looks like sharpness was added (maybe with USM - unsharp mask) and perhaps a gentle gaussian blur added to other portions of an image.

One way to make certain image areas appear sharper is to have them next to blurry parts. People especially apply soft blurs to skin in portrait shots to get rid of skin details that are unattractive (pores).

Also, sometimes eyes appear darker since they're recessed. You can cheat and use the shadow/highlight tool to brighted the eyes... or do it manually with curves.

You can also boost the contrast of the eyes to draw attention. Two of my favourite ways to this are to add USM with a low amount (20% ish) and high radius (30px or something)... or to add a curve adjustment layer without any changes to it, then change the blend mode to Soft Light. Fill the mask with black and paint the effect in where it's needed. From there, you can change the layer opacity to reduce the effect, or play with other blend modes in that category (overlay/hard light).

Maybe we could do a more basic, step by step for the amatures.

I'd love a thread based purely on the use of Curves too.

Offer up a sample picture and I'll see what I can do. Make sure the quality is descent though.