Meryl's Notes Blog

Here’s a quick story about red eye. We flew to Vegas on a late night flight and I committed a malaprop in saying, “We caught the shut eye out of Vegas.” I guess that can be true, too, since we all want shut eye instead of flying the red eye.

I’ve been taking bad photos lately. They’re either blurry or have red eye. I have digital photos of the kids that are adorable except for the red eye. You can buy a plug-in to correct it, but I wanted to do it on my own. OK, yeah, I am cheap. It worked. This is exactly how to do it in Photoshop 7 though technique works in Photoshop 4+, Photoshop LE, and Photoshop Elements:

1. Open the image.
2. Right-click on the image’s title (blue box up top) and select Duplicate.
3. Close the original image.
4. Click Windows > Documents > New Window. This opens another copy, but whatever you do to the copy will happen to the image. In other words, it’s the same document with two views.
5. Zoom on one window to 100%.
6. Zoom on the other window as close a possible to get a close view of the eyes.
7. Have both windows in full view. Resize as needed to accomplish this.
8. Create a new layer (doesn’t matter which window).
9. Use the eye dropper to pick a color from the iris of the eye, which is usually a gray or black tint with eye color. I couldn’t do this since the iris was completely red, so I opened another photo with the same person and used the eye dropper on that photo.
10. Switch to the brush tool and select a soft-edged brush.
11. Resize the pixel as needed.
12. With the layer selected, right-click on the layer > Blending Options > Blend Mode > Color.
13. In the Layers box, click Opacity and set it low around 30%. Experiment.
14. Paint over the red part of the eye on the new layer.
15. When satisfied with the results, merge down and save or File > Save for Web > Save as a JPG file.

Other things to try in the process:

After painting the iris, click Filters > Blur > Gaussian and try a 1 pixel blur to soften the edges. With the layer selected, right-click on the layer > Blending Options > Blend Mode > Saturation. This takes the red out, but might leave the eyes too gray and hollow.

If so, duplicate the saturation layer by dragging the layer to the New Layer icon. Right-click on the new (copied) layer > Blending Options > Blend Mode > Hue. This should put color back while preserving highlights. If the color is too strong, lower the opacity of the Hue layer.

Sources: http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/apsredeye.htm http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/2f10a.htm http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000q4o http://faculty.jmc.ksu.edu/omalley/www/mc635/helpfolder/redeye.html http://www.scrapjazz.com/resources/printer_121.shtml