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Alternate Red Eye Removal Techniques
for Versions Prior to Photoshop CS, continued...


Desaturate and Darken with Adjustment Layers

If you want maximum, after-the-fact flexibility in how you apply your retouching, even for something as simple as red-eye removal, then using selections and adjustment layers is the way to go. Here's a quick summary of one method:

1. Make a selection of the red areas of the eyes. The Magic Wand is a good tool for this since it creates selections based on the color of the pixel you click on. Start out with Tolerance set to the default of 32, and make sure Contiguous is checked. Click on the red of one of the eyes to create the initial selection. Shift-click to add to the selection if it's not perfect the first time (actually, Magic Wand selections are rarely perfect the first time). Shift-click in the second eye to select the reds areas there. Do not select the white catch light in the eyes.

A selection made with the Magic Wand.

2. Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation). The selection will be turned into a Layer Mask that will retstrict the Hue/Saturation effect so that it only shows up in the areas that were selected. Move the Saturation slider all the way to the left to -100 to desaturate the pupils and remove the red.

You can also try moving the Lightness slider to the left to darken the pupil (NOTE: the only potential problem with darkening the pupil here, is that it will also darken the catch light if that has been selected). Don't be too concerned if you see rough edges to the effect. We can fix that in the next step. Click OK when you have desaturated and darkened the eyes.

Removing the red with the Saturation slider and darkening with the Lightness slider. A small fringe surrounding the catch light has not been selected and is not being desaturated. This can be easily fixed in a subsequent step.

3. Make sure you're still zoomed in to at least 100% (View>Actual Pixels). The first step is to soften the edges of the layer mask that was created from the Magic Wand selection. Choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and add a blur of about 1 pixel to the mask. Click OK.

Adding a small blur to the layer mask will soften the hard edges that are typical with selections made using the Magic Wand.

4. If there are still areas of the mask that need some touch-ups, use a small paintbrush and paint with white where you want more of the desaturation/darkening to show, and with black where you want to hide it. If you have darkened using Hue/Saturation, be sure to paint with black over the catch light in the eye so the darkening does not affect it; catch lights should be bright.

Painting with white on the layer mask to add to areas that were not selected by the initial Magic Wand selection. Painting with white will show the desaturation and darkening effect.

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