Graphic Design 4: How to Remove Red Eye

Removing red eye from a photo.

If you are not already farmilar with this, here we go!

1. Open the image.

2. Go to Image – Duplicate.

3. In Photoshop 6 or earlier, go to View – New View. In Photoshop 7 go to Window – Documents – New Window. This will open a duplicate window of the same image.

4. Zoom one of the windows so that you can see the eyes as large as possible. Set the other window view to 100%.

5. Arrange the two windows so you can see both the zoomed view and the 100% view at the same time.

6. Create a new layer.

7. Use the eyedropper to pick up a color from the iris of the eye. It should be a fairly gray tint with a small portion of the eye color.

8. Paint over the red part of the eye on the new layer, being careful not to paint over the eyelids.

9. Go to Filters – Blur – Gaussian and give it about a 1 pixel blur to soften the edges.

10. Set the layer blend mode to Saturation. This will take the red out without removing the highlights, but in many cases it leaves the eyes too gray and hollow looking.

*Below is where the drop-down menu is located to get to the saturation. It is on the layers tab.

11. If that’s the case, duplicate the saturation layer and change the blend mode to Hue. That should put some color back in while still preserving the highlights.

12. If the color is too strong after adding a Hue layer, lower the opacity of the Hue layer.

13. When you’re happy with the results you can merge the extra layers down.

This should only take you about 5 minutes. If anyone know of a super duper faster way to do this, please comment.

Peace!