How to remove red-eye from digital pictures using Picasa-Gimp-Photoshop

Posted on March 19, 2008 at 6:09 am

Ahh! You took a beautiful picture of someone, the perfect angle and the perfect lighting, but it’s been ruined because of red-eye, which makes everyone look like some kind robotic monster! However, it’s super easy to remove red-eye from your digital pictures using a couple of free photo editing tools.

I’m going to walk you through the steps to remove red-eye using three different desktop applications: Picasa, Gimp, and Photoshop. Personally, I use Picasa myself, but obviously if you already have one of the other applications installed, you may as well use that to remove the red-eye.

How to remove red-eye using Picasa

I love Picasa because it’s a great photo management tool and it’s super easy to use. First, open Picasa and double-click on the picture that you want to remove the red-eye from. On the left-hand side, you should see a tab called Basic Fixes with a few buttons, one being Redeye.

Click on the button and now simply click, hold and drag your mouse around each eye to get rid of the red. Make sure the box is a little bigger than the entire pupil area, but not around the entire eye.

Notice how I selected just the pupil area and not the entire eye. If you select the whole eye, you’ll end up with something like this:

After you are happy with the result, go ahead and click on the Apply button in the left menu.

How to remove red-eye using GIMP

If you have GIMP installed on your computer, you can remove red-eye in a similar fashion with just a few minor differences. Firstly, open your picture in GIMP and click on the rectangle tool.

Now draw a rectangle around one eye or both eyes as you see fit. GIMP is a little better in the sense that you can select both eyes and it will figure out where to remove the red color from. Once you have selected the eyes, go to Filters, Enhance, and then Red Eye Removal.

You’ll now get the red eye removal popup, where by you can see the preview of the changes. You can also change the Threshold value up or down to adjust the eye color as you see fit.

And that’s it! Click OK and your photo should now be rid of red-eye! If you selected both eyes and the result was not that great, repeat the above steps, but only select one eye at a time.

How to remove red-eye using Photoshop

Well, if you’re using Photoshop CS2 or above, it’s actually a piece of cake to remove red eye because there is a Red Eye tool!

Now it’s a matter of just adjusting the pupil size and the darkening amount and clicking on each eye! Actually, most of the time the default values for fine, so just click on the each eye to see the result.

Now if you don’t have Photoshop CS2 or above, you’ll have to remove red-eye manually using some more advanced techniques in Photoshop. There are actually a couple of ways you can go about it, so I’ll point you to a few tutorials that can walk you through the different methods step by step.

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/photoshop/articles/phs8redeye.html – Walks you though how to use the Color Replacement tool in Photoshop to remove red eye quickly and easily.

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/cb/remove-red-eye.html – Method involves creating a new Channel mixer adjustment layer in Photoshop to remove red-eye.

Finally, if you’re someone who has NONE of these programs installed on your computer and you want to use an online photo editing program to remove red-eye, then you can check out the following list of sites that allow you to do just that and therefore avoid installing any application onto your computer:

http://pixenate.com/

http://www.blibs.com/editor/index.php?action=redeye

http://www.phixr.com/

Hopefully, this gives you enough ways to remove red eye from any digital picture that you may have! Enjoy!

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Comments

6 Responses to “How to remove red-eye from digital pictures using Picasa-Gimp-Photoshop”

TechPavan said on : March 19th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Is there any fully automated tool for the same purpose. I meant, I want to feed a complete folder or more number of files and it has to determine the eyes and apply the correction… If you know, do reply to this comment, I have subscribed for email…

akishore said on : March 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

TechPavan, the only way I think you could automate red-eye removal for a large number of pictures is by using scripts in Photoshop. However, I have no idea how to do this, but it might be possible!

TechPavan said on : March 20th, 2008 at 12:12 am

I too dont have any idea about that…

David Fink said on : April 18th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 and above includes an organizer that does a decent job finding and removing red eye in photos as you import them into the organizer

Everson said on : December 20th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

Thank you for this tutorial. However, I am using Photoshop CS2 and I cannot get this to work. I believe this feature was added in a later version. How can I remove red eye in this version?

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