AnandTech Guide to Better Photos: Post-Processing

Red-eye Reduction

Given the time and patience required, everyone could remove red-eye by hand using a paint brush in Photoshop or Elements. The point of this section is to show you how to do it as quickly as possible. Since the technique is a bit different between the two programs, we'll explain the process with Photoshop and Elements separately.

Here is the original image we will be working on.

Photoshop (CS)

1) Open the image with the red-eye problem and set the magnification to "Actual Pixels" so that you can get a good look at those red eyes. In our example image, the resolution of the original file is only 1 megapixel, so we are going to magnify the image by 300%. Next, hold the left mouse button down on the "Healing Brush Tool" and select the "Color Replacement Tool" from the flyout menu.

Color Replacement Tool

2) Press "D" to reset the colors to their defaults and make sure that Saturation mode is selected from the Options palette.

3) Select a brush that is about the size of the red-eye area and click once in the center.

4) Repeat for all other eyes in the image.

5) As an optional final touch, we like to get the Burn tool from the tools palette to darken the pupils a bit.

Photoshop Elements 3

1) Select the Red-eye Removal Tool from the tools palette.

Red-eye Removal Tool

2) Click and hold the left mouse button and draw a box around the red eye area. When you release the mouse button, the red-eye will be replaced with black. We found the default settings of "Pupil Size: 50%" and "Darken Amount: 50%" to work just fine for us.

Drawing a box around the red-eye area

In the end, we couldn't see much of a difference in effectiveness between the two programs. However, Photoshop Elements was a bit more efficient by darkening the pupils for us.

Photoshop CS	Photoshop Elements 3
Click images to enlarge.