Photoshop Tutorial: Fixing Red Eye & Other Eye Adjustments

Adobe Photoshop offers many features that allow users to change, adjust, and enhance photographs. This tutorial is geared towards a beginner within the Photoshop program, who needs to remove red eye or possibly even enrich the color of a subject's eyes within a photograph. I will go over the exact steps to follow while navigating through the program so that even if you are a novice to the program you can accomplish this very effectual, while simple feat. Included within these directions are other helpful tips and descriptions that should benefit you next time you need to adjust the appearance of one of your photos.

Step 1: open your Photoshop program and go to FILE -> OPEN within the application. Navigate through your hard drive and choose the photograph that you would like to adjust; press open. Before we continue there are a couple of specifications you need to make sure are in tact.

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Photographs and other types of documents that are created for the purpose of print need to be set to 300dpi to have the highest quality possible. DPI translated is dots per inch, which can also be said as pixels per inch. Many times you will open a document that automatically defaults to 72dpi; this setting is used for images meant to view on the web, or intended for electronic media purposes only. Intuitively, increasing your dpi (pixels per inch) will increase the sharpness of your image.

Step 2: To double check on the dpi of your photograph while you have it open in Photoshop, navigate to IMAGE->IMAGE SIZE. This dialogue box allows you to make the change to 300dpi if applicable.

Step 3: Use the magnifying glasses tool to get as close as possibly to the eyes within the image that you would like to change. This tool can be found within your toolbox area, click on it then hold down your mouse key while drawing a marquee around the area of your photograph being adjusted.

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The next step involves the magic wand tool. This tool is used to make selections within your document, and then in turn make changes that only affect this selection. The magic wand tool is a very powerful tool; when you click a part of your image, it will automatically select the parts around that area with similar colors. For this tutorial, we would like to select only the red part of the eye.

Step 4: Select the magic wand tool within the toolbox. Before you click on the image, there are a few settings for this tool that need to also be adjusted. First of all, we are going to FEATHER this selection. Feathering allows every selection that you make to affect a less rigid area; it fades the edges of the selection so that it blends with the areas around the selection. After selecting the magic wand tool and clicking on the area of your image you wish to adjust, go to the file menu area at the top of the program and click on SELELCT->FEATHER. Because you're dealing with such a small area, it is best to feather a very small amount. Change this feathering option to just 1px.

Step 5: The next setting to be changed within the magic wand tool is to change the TOLERANCE. This setting decides how tolerant the selection is to colors that don't match the exact area that you clicked on; type in 23 as the tolerance level.
Note: If you notice that the selection is too large, you might need to lower this number. If the selection is too small & doesn't cover the area of the eye that you want to adjust, this number might need to be increased.

Now you're ready to make the selection. You've used your magnifying glasses to view the red eyes close up, and targeted the part of the eye that you wish to adjust. With the magic wand tool selected, click within the red part of the eye. You will see a blinking, dashed line appear around this selection. Make sure that you are selecting the correct part of the eye. At this point, it is ok if the selection is a bit too small, but if it is too large you need to deselect (shortcut: ctrl d) and follow the steps again making adjustments to either the part of the eye you selected, tolerance or possibly increasing/decreasing the feathering.

This is the fun part. It will require some creativity from you, because you'll need to make the adjustments based upon what kind of effect you're looking for. There are many ways to do this, and I will go over the most popular and simple ways.

Step 6: With the red eye selected, navigate to you main file menu area at the top of the program and click IMAGE ->IMAGE ADJUSTMENTS. Here you will see many options pop up in the menu area. The best way to adjust red eye, is to click on HUE/SATURATION.

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A dialogue box will appear and you have 3 different sliding bars to choose from.
HUE: Changes the color of the area you've selected. For mild color changes simply slide the bar and observe the preview until you have your desired effect. For more intense color changes, click on the checkbox in the lower left corner of this dialogue area entitled, "Colorize." Now attempt to adjust the HUE sliding bar and watch the changes take effect until you are pleased with the outcome.
SATURATION: Adjust this sliding bar to watch the colors become more vivid and intense. Use in combination with the HUE sliding bar to achieve your intended results.
LIGHTNESS: This sliding bar can lighten or darken your selection.

Step 7: Use the LIGHTNESS sliding bar to make the red area darker and more coincide with the look of a pupil. Adjust the SATURATION and possibly HUE if needed.

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Not only can you remove the red eye, but you can adjust the color of the eye to be: blue, brown, green, magenta! Just reselect the area you wish to adjust color and move the HUE/SATURATION/LIGHTNESS bars up/down until you have the look you're going for.
HINT: If you've chosen a specific shade or color with the HUE sliding bar, you can move the SATURATION sliding bar up to enhance and brighten this color.

Step 8: When you're done, make sure you save the file as a photograph file and not a Photoshop file. To get the best possible quality out of your image, navigate to FILE ->SAVE FOR WEB. This feature is useful because it will give you a direct preview of the image before you save it.

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Once you've chosen SAVE FOR WEB another dialogue box will appear displaying two images, one of your left and one on your right. The left image is your current Photoshop file; the right image is a preview of what your file will look like once saved according to the current settings.

Step 9: On the right hand side choose JPG from the drop down menu. For a photograph meant for print this is the best possible choice. Make sure the QUALITY drop down menu is set to high, and you are pleased with the appearance of the right hand image. Press SAVE and you're done!