Red eye. What a pain in the ass. I have so many great photos in my iPhoto Library which have been ruined because of red eye. Sometimes I use the red eye tools iPhoto or Adobe Photoshop to fix problematic images, but unfortunately they don't always do a good job.

Luckily red eye is very easy to fix manually in Adobe Photoshop. You just need to know how.

Here's a tutorial on how to remove red eye using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 or higher.

Requirements:

• Any digital photo with a red eye problem
• Adobe Photoshop 7.0 or higher (Mac or PC)

Removing Red Eye with Adobe Photoshop

1. Open the image in Adobe Photoshop (File > Open) and make sure your Layers window is visible. If you can't see your Layer window, please activate it from the Windows menu (Window > Layers).
   
   
   
   
   
2. At the bottom of the Layers window is a little adjustment layer symbol. The symbol looks like a half white, half black circle . Click on the adjustment layer symbol and select Channel Mixer. The Channel Mixer allows you to individually adjust the red, green and blue values of an image. Since we want to get rid of the red, make the Red channel 0%, Green 50%, Blue 50%.
   
   
   
   The person in your picture will look bluish green like they were doing shots of whiskey all night and are about to puke. Yummy.
   
   
   
3. Look at your layers window again. The Channel Mixer adjustment layer should have a small white box to the right. This is a mask. Masks in Adobe Photoshop act like stencils. The Channel Mixer adjustment layer will ignore anything you paint black in this mask box.
   
   
   
   Make sure your Foreground color is set to black and select a soft edge paint brush. Click in the white mask box to make it active and paint the areas of the eyes that were red. They will become red again.
   
   
   
4. You should now have someone with a blue face and red eyes. This is the exact opposite of what we want. We need to reverse the mask or invert it (see image). To invert the mask select Invert from the Image menu (Image > Adjustments > Invert).
   
   
   
   After you invert the layer mask, the person in your image should no longer look sickly.
   
   
   
   
   
5. How does it look? Do you see a reddish glow or ring around the eyes? If so, click on the layer mask box again to make it active, select white as your Foreground color and carefully paint around the edges with your paint brush.
   
   
   
6. To soften the edges a little, you can apply a Gaussian Blur to the Channel Mixer's layer mask. Click on the Channel Mixer layer mask to make it active. Then select Gaussian Blur from the Filter menu (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur).
   
   
   
   Your Gaussian Blur probably only needs a 1-3 Radius value. Experiment with different values until you're happy.
   
   
   
   
   
7. Are the eyes too blue? Too purple? Still too red? You can double click on the Channel Mixer adjustment layer and modify the color settings. The image I was using in this tutorial only needed 4% blue, not 50%. Every image will be slightly different.
   
   
   
   
   
8. That's it. You should now have a nice picture without any red eye problems..

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