Bobs blog

Tip #4 Red Eye Removal

First, lets understand what red eye is and ways to reduce it in the photography step.

Red Eye is caused by light entering the eye and reflecting off the blood vessels in the retina.  The closer the flash is to the lens the worse red eye tends to get.  One way to reduce red eye is to get the flash away from the lens.  With point and shoots this is not an option.  The red eye reduction modes on these cameras are intended to reduce the dilation of the pupil thereby reducing the amount of light reflecting off the retina.  In my experience these systems do little except make people blink.  Now there is no red eye because everybody has their eyes closed.  An interesting solution but hardly practical.  Increasing the ambient lighting in the room can help.  However, since the light emitted from a flash overpowers the ambient lighting red eye still appears.  Moving closer to your subject can help because you are increasing the angle at which the light reflects from the eye in relation to the lens.  The greater this angle the less likely you are to have red eye.  That is why moving the flash away from the camera works.  Essentially, if the flash fires on a point and shoot you are likely to get red eye

Enough of that!  This is supposed to be about Photoshop.  Lets look at a Photoshop solution.

The photo on the left is the actual shot from my Canon S500.  The photo on the right is after my red eye reduction method, it took less than two minutes.

Lets get a closer look at Jess’ red eyes.  Zooming in to view at 100% makes working on this much easier.  We don’t want to reduce the blue of the iris at all so we need to target the red.

First I created an adjustment layer.  At the bottom of the layers palate I clicked the adjustment layers icon and choose “Hue/Saturation…” from the drop down menu.

This brought up the following dialogue box.  I choose “Reds” from the edit drop down menu within this box.

I move the “Saturation” and “Lightness” sliders all the way to the left (-100),  then did the same for the sliders in the “Yellows” and “Magentas” from the edit drop  down menu.

I clicked “OK” in the dialogue box.  This resulted in all the reds, yellows, and magentas being desaturated and darkened.  The photo of Jess now then looked like this.

I really only wanted to correct for the red eye so I needed to fix this.  I clicked on the layer mask portion of the “Hue/Saturation…”  layer so I could work on the mask.  The mask was white and I needed it to be black so I used the keyboard shortcut to invert the mask (command + I).  The layer palate then looked like this.

I needed to make the mask white over the red area of Jess’ eyes.  I  choose a hard edged brush about 2 or 3 pixels larger than the red area of the eye then clicked over the red area.  note: You can quickly choose white as your painting color by pushing “D” on the keyboard to return to the default colors of black (foreground) and white (background) then pushing “X” to exchange those colors.  Remember, your brush ALWAYS paints with the foreground color.

Here is the photo with one eye done.

When I finished painting on the mask over both eyes I gave the mask a gaussian blur of 1 pixel to slightly soften the edges of my two brush strokes.  The layers palate then looked like this.

And the photo looked like this.

Here is a quick review:

1. Create a Hue/Saturation… layer to desaturate and darken the reds, yellows and magentas.

2. Invert the layer mask.

3. Choose the proper size brush and paint white over the red eye areas.

4. Soften the mask with a 1 pixel blur.

It is only four easy steps and the results are fantastic.  There are many other ways to accomplish this task which are just as effective.  This method, however, is the fastest and most reliable I have discovered to date.

Tip #3 Easy darken and lighten method

If you have a file that is somewhat overexposed you can increase the contrast and darken the photo in 2 or 3 easy steps.     1. Duplicate your background layer.  2. Change the blending mode to “multiply” (Blending modes are found in the layers palate immediately underneath the layers tab).  3. If the result is too dark use the opacity slider (found just to the right of the blending modes in the layers palate) to reduce the effect.  Or, if the effect is still too light simply re-duplicate the duplicate layer and adjust the opacity slider if the effect is too dark.

If your file is too dark you can use the exact same method as above but use “screen” from the blending mode menu.  Now, if the effect is too light you will adjust the opacity slider.

Bear in mind that this method has pitfalls.  You can make already dark or light areas too dark or too light.  Also, you can increase noise in the file.  Inspect the file carefully and ALWAYS save a layered copy so you can turn the duplicate layers off if necessary.

Tip #2 Get your horizon level.

An easy way to level a tilted photo is to choose the ruler tool (located under the eyedropper tool in the tool bar) then click and drag a line along the tilted horizon which you want to make level.  Next, click on the Image drop down menu from the Photoshop menu bar and select Rotate Canvas / Arbitrary….  This will bring up a dialog box showing the direction and degree of rotation, click OK.  Ta-daaaaa, you’ve done it.  Quick, easy and no guess work involved.  You can use this same technique to  correct tilted verticals such as telephone poles or the sides of buildings.

Tip #1 Scroll through photos

Quickly scroll through open photos by holding down the control key and pressing the tab key