Red eye tool

Red eye in portraits is caused when the flash source is used too close to the lens axis and the pupils of the eye are wide open. One way to avoid this happening is to set your camera flash to red eye mode (if available). The camera will usually pop a single or short series of flashes just before firing the main camera flash exposure. Failing that, the red eye tool in Photoshop is an easy-to-use tool for removing red eye from photographs that have been taken with a direct flash source.

The red eye tool Options bar is shown in Figure 1 below. The Pupil Size setting should be adjusted depending on the pixel dimensions of the image you are working on. And the Darken Amount setting can be adjusted according to the lightness of the red eye in the shot. Although you will find that the default settings tend to work just fine in the majority of cases. But now of course, there is also a really good red eye removal tool in Camera Raw that in many ways is more sophisticated than the one described here.

Figure 1 The red eye tool Options bar.

1 The red eye tool is very easy to use and effective at removing red eye from portraits shot with a direct flash.

2 The default tool settings should be OK to start with. To use the tool just click on the red area of the eye. Photoshop can then automatically calculate how to remove the red cast and darken the pupils.