Written By:Neil Duffin

Getting The Red Out

Redeye can ruin an otherwise perfectly good portrait, but there are ways to remove it. Unfortunately some of these methods can remove detail in the eyes and make them look very unusual, even lifeless. The following is a simple method of removing the problem while still retaining detail and a normal appearance to theƒ«windows of our soulí.

Iím going to be usingAdobe Photoshop 6, but the technique should be possible in other packages too. All you need are channels, layers and layer masks.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the original image‚ not exactly the best picture of an eye ever, but it serves to show redeye. We start by duplicating the image into a second layer, layer > duplicate layer.Here Iíve called the new layerƒ«false colourí for reasons that will become obvious in a moment (plus I live in the UK :). Figure 2 shows the Photoshop layers after this step.

Figure 2

Now to remove the redeye. We do this by removing...