Photoshop Tutorial: Getting rid of red eye

April 6th, 2008

There are a lot of ways to get rid of red eye from photos, and in Photoshop you can be a little more particular about it to get a natural looking result. Here is a quick tutorial of one way to go about it.

Here is the image we will work with:

To start, create a new layer. Next, select the red parts of the eyes using the circle marquee tool.

Using the fill (bucket) tool, fill the new layer with black in this area and switch the layer style to Hue. This will get rid of our red eye but will leave her looking a little freaky.

To fix this we’re going to add a little bit of color the gray-scale eyes we just created. If there is a good color sample of the general color of the eye, select it using the eyedropper. Otherwise select a good color that matches the correct eye color you need.

Create another layer and use the same selection we used for the last step to fill in your color. Change this layer style to Color. You may need to adjust the opacity.

Since her eyes still look a little strange because the red eye without color is much lighter than a normal eye would look. So we’re going to remedy this by adding one more layer and brushing in a small amount of black on the opposite side of the eye highlights for a natural fix.

And that’s about it! Now, to fix the girl in the background… but to save time, I simply cropped the picture.

Photo credits.