Tutorial: Fixing Red Eye in Photoshop

Another way to Fix Red eye in Photoshop 7, CS or Photoshop elements
by Angie Svoboda

Red eye commonly occurs when shooting with a compact flash camera because the flash is positioned very close to the camera lens.  Another situation for unavoidable red eye is in a darkly lit room where the subject’s pupils are dilated.  The example I will work this tutorial on is from a dark gym during a Christmas program.  Notice the horrible red eye in the children.  This is the type of red eye that is also seen commonly in pets and is very difficult to prevent.

First you will want to make a copy of the image you will be working on.

Next zoom in close to the eye you will be working on.  Make sure you are working on the duplicate copy.

Select the sponge tool on the tool bar (usually under the dodge or burn tool).  Make sure desaturate is selected.  I have set my flow at 100% (which means every thing the sponge paints over will be changed to 100% black and white).  You can set this to whatever you want.

Next just paint with the sponge over the area you want to remove the red from.  Do this for all the eyes in the picture that you want to correct.

 

 

Next step is make a new layer.

These next steps will be done on the new layer you just created.  Use the elliptical marquee tool and draw a circle around the eye.  You can make a perfect circle by holding the shift key while you draw the circle.  You can also move the circle you have drawn if it is not perfect or deselect and redraw it.

In the next step select the color of the eye you will be changing.  I am using a dark brown for my example.  Use the paint bucket and fill in with color.  You may need to click twice to fill in the circle.

 

 

Continue to work on all the eyes; you can keep all this on one layer.  Now change the layer mode to color or hard light.  You may want to experiment with this to see what look best for the picture.  In my example I used hard light.

 

 

 

The finished picture.   The last step is to merge all layers into one so you can use the photo in your layout.  You can do this in the layer menu, select merge visible or flatten image.