Photoshop Tutorial: Retouching Red Eye

There's nothing quite like taking the perfect shot of someone only to have it ruined by eerie, glowing eyes. Red eye occurs when the flash reflects off of the retina in the eye creating a red reflection. The best way to get rid of red eye is to avoid it all together. If you have the option of getting your flash higher than your subject's eyes, such as with studio lighting or a flash that mounts on top of your camera you can usually avoid most red eye. But when you do not have that option there is always Photoshop! What would I do without it? I think if my house were to catch fire I would save my Photoshop backup disc first! In this tutorial you will learn how to remove the red eye from your pictures.

There are several tutorials for removing the red eye in your pictures, but I am going to share with you my favorite technique. The first thing you need to do, is open your picture in Photoshop and use the magnifying tool to enlarge the picture up so that the eyes are big enough to work on (see picture: 1).

Next you need to select the puplis, or the parts that you want to fix. There are many ways to do this. In Photoshop, I generally just use the lasso tool. I begin by tracing around the pupil and then holding down the shift key to trace the other pupil. As a general rule, it is better to go slightly larger. I will often go to Select (at the top), Modify, and the Expand by 1 or 2 pixels (see picture: 2). Once the pupils are selected, make a new layer by copying them. You can go to Layer and then Copy Layer, or just right click on the area and select Layer Via Copy (see picture: 3).

Now we need to remove all of that red. So we are going to desaturate the layer (make sure you are working on the new layer of just the pupils). To do this, go to Images, Adjustments, and then Desaturate (see picture: 4). As you can see from the photo, this removes all of the redness, but now the pupils have a grayish tone and look too light.

This is where we use curves. Go to Images, Adjustments, and Curves (see picture: 5). Selecting curves will bring up a grid with a diagonal line. Grab the middle of the line (the midtones) and pull it down some so that the pupils darken (see picture: 6). If the pupils look too dark, that is okay. Once you have them darkened, select okay and the use hand tool or the magnifier to zoom back out.

Once you have zoomed back out, go to your layer palette (if this is not open, go to Windows and check Layers to open it) and slide the opacity level down until the picture looks right. This can vary depending on the photo but I usually lower it between 70-80% depending on how bad the red eye is (see picture: 7).

And there you have it, a perfect picture without that ugly red eye. Removing the red eye can make a world of difference in your photographs. No one will ever know it was there.