Darkend eyes - corrections?

[MichaelKirk]

I was planning on giving some family framed photos Xmas and noticed that when PP the eyes and surrounding areas end up getting over darkened. Am I doing something drastically incorrect? How you you guys/gals/ keep this from happening? Is it as easy as applying a bit of "lightening" to the eye areas? Are my level adjustments off?
Pretty much all I do as far as PP is:
Noise reduction
basic levels &/or curves adjustment
maybe add a soft layer at 5% opac to boost some color
Apply a median filter @ around 50% opac and erase out the eyes, mouth , hair, etc.
Sharpening

Here is the original image
http://www.mlkimages.com/photos/116647412-L.jpg


and below is after some PP
- zooming in the eyes at 100% and you can really see what I mean.


Michael

[Duffy Pratt]

I'm not sure what is causing the darkening in the eyes. I took a shot at my own correction with the following steps:

1) Apply the green channel to a duplicate layer in luminosity mode at 70%. This brings more detail out in the faces, and makes the lips a bit darker.
2) Wrote RGB curves that made a black point using the right hand girls hair under the ear on the right. Its actually a brown point, it started at about 35,35,27 and I brought it down to 19,19,15.
3) Convert to LAB and write curves to take out the blue in the girl on the right's sweater, while keeping the skin tones reasonable (some may think I went to warm on the skin tones. That would be trivial to back away from.)
4) Unsharp mask on the L channel at about 50, 18, 15.

I don't think my version has a big problem with eye darkening. Sharpening may be your culprit. The sharpening puts dark halos in the eyes to bring out the catch in the center of the eye. I noticed that when I tried a conventional sharpen.

Hope this helps. I'm curious: how does a "soft layer" boost color? I'm not sure how that works. Also, why do you need to do any erasing at all on an image like this? Again, I'm not saying you don't need to. I'm just trying to learn.

Duffy