How to Remove Red Eyes From a Photo Using Photoshop Elements 15

During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, we will demonstrate how to correct eye color on people and animals in a photo by performing red eye and pet eye removal.

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Welcome back to our course on PSE 15.

In this section we’re going to look at one of the most common fixes that you will probably need to perform on pictures of people taken indoors with flash and that is Red Eye Removal. It’s an almost unavoidable problem whereby if you take pictures with flash indoors and people are looking at you and the flash you get this red eye effect that you can see in the little girl there.

One of the less known effects but also one that people like to fix is what’s called Pet Eye Removal. The problem with pet eye removal compared to human red eye removal is that the changes in color and the effect on eye color in pets is more variable than it is in humans. And usually to remove the effect in an animal such as the dog in this picture takes a little bit more work. So let’s start with the girl.

So let me choose the Red Eye Removal tool and I’m going to try Auto Correct. Now you should just about manage to see there the change in her eyes. Let’s do a before and after view and let me use the zoom tool and zoom in on the general area of her eyes. I only need to do it on either the before or the after. And now you can see both versions. You’ve got the before on the left. Note the redness in the pupils.

And then on the right it’s removed the redness. Now it’s removed the redness but of course it can’t replace it necessarily with the correct eye color. So you may want to do something that’s a little bit more like the pet eye that I’m going to do in just a moment if you want to restore the person’s correct eye color. But in terms of removing red eye itself it’s done a pretty good job. Let’s go back to Fit Screen. Now I’m going to look at After Only and let’s turn our attention to the dog.

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The first thing I’m going to do is to zoom in on one of the dog’s eyes. Having zoomed in on that eye I’m going to select the Red Eye Removal tool and make sure I’ve got Pet Eye selected. Having selected Pet Eye I’m going to draw a rectangle around the eye. So click, draw a rectangle and release. And what PSE 15 does is effectively to darken the center of the rectangle where the eye is.

Now if I want more or less darkening I can use the Darken Slider which is part of the tool options for Red Eye Removal. So if I don’t want it quite as dark as that I can make it a little bit lighter or darker still maybe. And I can also vary the pupil radius as a proportion of the selected eye area. So I started off with a default of 50%. If I want to make it a bigger area, bigger area and so on I can or maybe less and less.

So by adjusting the pupil radius and the level of darkening I can achieve a realistic representation of this dog’s actual eye color and the amount of the eye that’s actually dark. A dog like this would probably have quite dark pupils.

So having tried that let’s go back out to Fit Screen and you can see one of the eyes looks much more realistic than it did before. Of course I haven’t worked on the other eye. I’d need to do the same on there. And depending on how much time I was prepared to spend on this I should be able to make the dog’s eyes look as much like they really look in real life as I want to.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!