Fixing Red Eyes

I don’t know about you, but I tend to see a lot of red eyes in my photos.  As I don’t have time to learn how to avoid red eyes in the first place, I rely on the Red Eye Tool in Photoshop to help me edit my photos. It’s a really cool tool, and *most* of the time it’s super good at what it does.

Adobe has a help center on their web site that gives you tips on using the various tools in their programs. I first stumbled upon it when I bought Illustrator — the welcome window had a link titled “Getting Started” and that seemed like a good place to start.

Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to link you up to Adobe’s help for the quick tutorial on using this tool. Read about the Red Eye Tool in Photoshop. Read about Auto Red Eye Fix and manually fixing red eye in Photoshop Elements. When I’ve used PSE, I usually try the manual method first. If it doesn’t work the way I want it to, I’ll switch to Auto Red Eye Fix and usually it’ll do the job. (Note: PSE gives you the option of automatically fix red eye as you load photos into the Organizer — I would NOT recommend this, as the Red Eye Tool is not perfect.)

Most of the time, the Red Eye Tool works great … but sometimes, no matter how you adjust the settings, it keeps trying to “fix” the wrong parts in the picture. Let me illustrate what I’m talking about with this picture (totally unedited).

Notice the red in my hair? I LOVE my hair, but sometimes it gives the Red Eye Tool grief. I used the Red Eye Tool to fix the red eyes in my hubby and son with no problem. It even fixed one of my eyes perfectly. But when I tried to click on the second eye — the one near the flash bouncing off my glasses — well, here’s what happened. Not very pretty, huh?

Sometimes the Red Eye Tool gets confused and darkens the wrong parts. I’ve also seen it only darken part of the pupil, and not the whole thing. So, here’s a trick to use when the Red Eye Tool just isn’t quite fixing those darn red eyes — use the sponge tool. It’s nested with the dodge and burn tools.

It’s best to zoom way in so you can see what you’re doing. Adjust the size of the sponge so it’s smaller than the pupil. Leave the mode on Desaturate. You can play around with the flow — in this case, I set it to 100%. Then brush over the pupil until it’s no longer red. Zoom out to see how it looks. See? Much better.

You can also try using the recoloring method I taught you a while back — just make sure to use a small brush size.

Sometimes the problem isn’t red eyes — like with pets, and even some shots of my son, when you end up with a greenish or yellowish color. Dave Nagel has a pretty cool article about working with the channel mixer to fix red eyes, green eyes, and yellow eyes.

Hopefully, one of these tips will help you be able to fix those problematic eyes in the photos we take with our less-than-professional photography skills. Let me know what you think! And if you know of other good tutorials or tips, link us up!