Digital Focus: Advanced Red-Eye Removal Tips

Feature: Remove Red Eye From Your Holiday Photos

By now you've had time to root through all those holiday photos and sort them into keepers and trash. What's that, you say? It's already February and you did this weeks ago? Well, I'll let you in on a little secret: I still haven't sorted my holiday pics from 1999, when I got sidetracked stockpiling Gatorade and Spam in preparation for Y2K. So this is right on time for me.

I bet that a lot of your photos have the dreaded red-eye effect. It happens when you use a flash indoors in relatively low light; your subject's pupils open way up to compensate for the dim lighting, and your flash consequently reflects off the retinas. The result is common, but ugly and a little creepy.

You can avoid a lot of red eye by turning on your camera's red-eye mode, which flashes before the actual exposure to helps your subject's eyes adjust to the bright light. You can also eliminate the red eye in an image editor afterwards. Some programs have an automatic red-eye removal feature. If yours doesn't, you can use the following steps to do get the red out manually.

Prepare Your Tools

You can use almost any image editing program; I'll show you how it's done with Paint Shop Pro. Load an image with red eye into the program and then zoom in until the eyes fill most of the screen. If you want to experiment with my family instead of yours, save this file to your hard drive and then open it.

Start by choosing the Paint Brush from the toolbar (it's about halfway down the toolbar and looks like a typical paint brush). Make sure that its shape is set to round in the Tool Options dialog box. If you don't see the Tool Options dialog box on screen, right-click on the toolbar and choose Tool Options to open it.

Next, set the size of the brush to approximately the diameter of a red eye in the photo. In my sample photo, 12 pixels is just about right, but you'll have to experiment to find the right size for your photos. To test, just dab the brush in the center of the eye and see if you cover all of--but not more than--the red area. Select Edit, Undo Paintbrush between tries.

Pick the Colors

Now it's time to set the foreground and background colors for the brush. We want the foreground color to be dark, perhaps even black. You can set it to pure black (just click in the black part of the color palette on the right side of the screen), but you'll often get a more realistic effect by setting the foreground to the darkest part of the subject's hair. To do that, choose the Dropper tool (it's the eyedropper in the toolbar) and click in a dark region of the subject's hair.

The background color needs to be white, so select the second box right under the color palette on the right side of the screen and then right-click in the white region of the color palette.

Dab Those Eyes

Now we're ready to get rid of the red. If you need to re-select the paint brush, do that now. Then position the brush over a red eye and click to stamp it black. You may need to stamp it more than once to eliminate the red.

Add Some Blur

Now for a special trick that'll add a bit of realism to this digital trickery. Most eyes aren't a solid blob of color, but are instead a blend of several colors. To achieve a similar effect, select the region you just stamped by dragging the Magic Wand tool from the toolbar (yes, it looks like a magic wand) and clicking in one of the now-dark eyes. Hold down Shift and click around if you don't get all of it the first time; right-click when you're satisfied that you have it all. Choose Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur from the menu and click OK to let the effect kick in. You should see that the eye now has some color variations, more like a real photo. If you didn't select the other eye at the same time, go back and select the other eye to blur it as well.

And Now for Some Glint

When you're done blurring the eyes, go to the Tool Options dialog box and change the brush size to about 2 pixels, then click to add the white glint in the center of the eye. For a final touch, you can use the Magic Wand to select the glint and blur it as well. That's all there is to it.

Is your "eye job" perfect? Probably not. The eyes are typically a very small element in a photo, though, so even a quick job--like in my "after" shot--can dramatically improve a picture.