Photoshop Red Eye Fix for Difficult Cases in People and Pets
Recent versions of Photoshop have an automatic Red Eye Removal tool, but it doesn't always work. What do you do when that tool fails — as it does all too often with people, and nearly always with pets?
The technique below is described by photographer Phil Steele in his video "Photoshop Red Eye Fix for Difficult Cases". It works equally well on humans with red and and pets with green or yellow or other colors caused by your flash bouncing light off the retina. You can recover even the most challenging red eye with the right Photoshop tricks.
Open the photo in Adobe Photoshop and do the following:
1. Zoom in on the eye of your subject
2. Get your Paintbrush (shortcut B)
3. Set your foreground color to black
4. In the options bar, set the brush mode to Color, opacity 100%
By painting with the brush in this mode, we will desaturate the area that we paint.
5. Using a small brush with a medium-soft edge, paint the mis-colored part of the eye to desaturate it.
Since all we are doing is desaturating, this leaves the highlight and other gradients that reveal the shape of the eye intact. If we simply painted black we would destroy these details that make the eye look realistic.
After desaturating the color, all we need to do is darken the pupil.
6. Get the Burn tool
7. In the options bar, select Midtones, Exposure 20%
8. Paint gradually in the pupil to burn (darken) the Midtones
By restricting our burn to the Midtones, we avoid destroying the highlight in the eye or darkening that natural rim around the eye. We only affect the middle gray that was originally colored red or green.
9. Continue burning in small strokes to darken the pupil to a reasonably dark gray (not pure black), and you're done!
Of course, this technique won't work in every case, because there are a lot of different types of "red eye" in people and animals, but it's usually my first go-to method for tough cases.
For a video version of this tutorial, including this and several more techniques for difficult cases, visit this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzePC0P2Vko
The technique below is described by photographer Phil Steele in his video "Photoshop Red Eye Fix for Difficult Cases". It works equally well on humans with red and and pets with green or yellow or other colors caused by your flash bouncing light off the retina. You can recover even the most challenging red eye with the right Photoshop tricks.
Open the photo in Adobe Photoshop and do the following:
1. Zoom in on the eye of your subject
2. Get your Paintbrush (shortcut B)
3. Set your foreground color to black
4. In the options bar, set the brush mode to Color, opacity 100%
By painting with the brush in this mode, we will desaturate the area that we paint.
5. Using a small brush with a medium-soft edge, paint the mis-colored part of the eye to desaturate it.
Since all we are doing is desaturating, this leaves the highlight and other gradients that reveal the shape of the eye intact. If we simply painted black we would destroy these details that make the eye look realistic.
After desaturating the color, all we need to do is darken the pupil.
6. Get the Burn tool
7. In the options bar, select Midtones, Exposure 20%
8. Paint gradually in the pupil to burn (darken) the Midtones
By restricting our burn to the Midtones, we avoid destroying the highlight in the eye or darkening that natural rim around the eye. We only affect the middle gray that was originally colored red or green.
9. Continue burning in small strokes to darken the pupil to a reasonably dark gray (not pure black), and you're done!
Of course, this technique won't work in every case, because there are a lot of different types of "red eye" in people and animals, but it's usually my first go-to method for tough cases.
For a video version of this tutorial, including this and several more techniques for difficult cases, visit this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzePC0P2Vko
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