When you take a flash picture of people or animals, sometimes their eyes look red—the result of the flash’s light reflecting off the retina of the eye. Use the Red Eye Removal command to return eyes to natural colors. You can also use this command to enhance or change eye colors. If a human eye is partially obscured, select the Auto Human Eye method, and then use the Refine setting to adjust the correction area.
Important: This command works on 16 million color or greyscale images only. To increase the color depth of an image, see Increasing the Color Depth of an Image.
To use the Red Eye Removal command:
Make sure the image has no selections. If necessary, choose Selections > Select None. The Red Eye Removal command is not available if the image contains a selection.
Choose Adjust > Photo Fix > Red Eye Removal.
In the right preview window, center the red eyes of the subject. Pan the image by clicking and dragging in the preview window; zoom in or out as necessary.
Note: You must use the right preview window for panning the image because you select the subject’s eyes in the left preview window.
From the Method drop-list, select a correction method:
Auto Human Eye Automatically selects the correction area using a circular selection and chooses settings appropriate to a human eye. If you are correcting human eyes (even partially obscured ones), try this method first.
Auto Animal Eye Automatically selects the correction area using a circular or elliptical selection area and chooses settings appropriate to an animal eye. You can also rotate the selection with this method. If you are correcting animal eyes, try this method first.
Freehand Pupil Outline Manually select the correction area on human or animal eyes using a Freehand Selection tool. Use this method for difficult situations, such as a partially obscured pupil.
Point-to-Point Pupil Outline Manually select the correction area on human or animal eyes using a Point-to-Point Selection tool. Use this method for difficult situations, such as a partially obscured pupil.
In the left preview window, select the first eye to correct:
For the Auto Human Eye or Auto Animal Eye method, click anywhere inside the red area of the eye to select the eye automatically. You can also click and drag from the center of the eye to the outside edge of the red area.
For the Freehand Pupil Outline method, click and drag the cursor around the edge of the red area of the pupil. Release the mouse button when you reach the beginning point of the selection.
For the Point-to-Point Pupil Outline method, left-click at points a few pixels apart around the edge of the red area of the pupil. (Right-click to reverse a click.) When you reach the beginning point, double-click.
Note: To remove a selection, click Delete.
After you select the eye, a circle appears around the selected area and a control box for making adjustments encloses the circle. The right preview window displays the corrected eye.
Make sure the selection is positioned and sized properly over the red area of the eye:
To move the selection, drag it to a new location.
For the Auto Animal Eye method, drag the center rotation handle to rotate the selection. You can also reshape the eye from a circle to an ellipse by dragging its side handles.
Fine-tune the eye correction by adjusting the pupil size and lightness, glint, iris size, and feathering and blurring of the iris. Refer to the fine-tuning steps later in this section.
To correct other red eyes, repeat the previous steps. The settings from the first eye are retained, so the subsequent corrections should be much quicker.
Click OK.
To fine-tune the eye correction on the Red Eye Removal dialog:
For a human eye, look at the corrected eye to see if you need to adjust the iris area around the pupil. (An animal eye usually does not show an iris.) Sometimes the red eye area covers the iris. If needed, adjust the iris with the following options:
Iris Size The size of the iris. Increasing the iris size decreases the pupil size.
Hue The color of the iris (such as blue, brown, or green). This option is not available for the Freehand Pupil Outline and Point-to-Point Pupil Outline methods because these methods select the pupil, rather than the pupil and iris.
Color The color variation of the iris (such as light blue or deep blue).
For Pupil lightness, adjust the value so that the corrected eye appears the appropriate shade and matches your perception of the natural color.
Examine the glint in the eye. A glint makes the eye look natural and lively; without it the eye looks “dead.” Adjust the glint using the following options:
Glint size The size of the glint.
Glint lightness The lightness of the glint. Lower values darken the glint; higher values lighten it.
Center glint Mark the check box to move the glint to the center of the pupil. Clear it to leave the glint at its original position.
Use Refine when the eye is partially obscured in the original image. For example, if the eyelid covers part of the original eye, it should cover it in the corrected eye. Use the Refine Slider to reduce the correction. Slowly drag the slider to the left to reduce the correction and minimize its overlap with the surrounding skin.
To blend the corrected eye with the rest of the image, set the following options:
Feather Adjusts the edges of the corrected eye. Smaller values make the edges more defined; larger values blend the edges to the surrounding image areas.
Blur Blends the eye with surrounding pixels when the photo has a grainy appearance. Increase the setting one unit at a time until the eye blends naturally with the rest of the image.
Basic Steps in Improving Photographs
How to Approach Color, Contrast, and Saturation Adjustments
Common Problems and How to Solve Them
Removing Image Defects and Noise