How to Use Photoshop’s Red Eye Tool

Using Photoshop’s Red Eye tool is easy and effective—often, you can eliminate red eye with just a single click in each affected eye. Before you start using the Red Eye tool, though, it’s important to note one major disadvantage of the tool—it’s destructive, which means it makes a permanent change to the image that, once saved, can’t be altered. Though there’s a nondestructive approach to removing red eye, it takes several more steps and requires a more advanced knowledge of Photoshop, such as layers and blending modes. The following steps cover the destructive approach, which is the fastest and easiest way to solve everyday red eye problems, such as the one in the sample image shown here.

 

Step 1: Zoom In on the Red Eyes

Press Ctrl+Plus Sign (or Command+Plus Sign on a Mac) to zoom in to get a close-up view of the red eyes in your image. Zoom until you can see the boundary of the redness in each eye up close, as in the image shown here.

 

Step 2: Click on the Red Area in Each Eye

With the Red Eye tool selected, click inside the red area of each eye—the cursor will look like a mini-crosshairs, and you’ll want to place the center of the crosshairs within the red area if possible. If you can’t zoom in close enough to click directly on the red area, don’t worry—Photoshop will find the red area within the eye if you click anywhere within the eye, even in the whites of the eye. Even so, the tool works better the closer you click to the red area, so try to position the crosshairs as close as possible to the red area itself. Then click once on each eye: the Red Eye tool will automatically attempt to replace the red pupils with appropriately sized and darkened pupils.

 

Step 3: Zoom Out to 100% View

The Red Eye tool often delivers satisfactory results on the first try, but you won’t be able to tell instantly how well it worked. To get a better look, you need to zoom back out to see how the eyes look from further away. To zoom out, press Press Ctrl+Minus Sign (or Command+Minus Sign on a Mac) until the view returns to 100% (look at the top of the Photo­shop window to see the current zoom percentage).

 

Step 4: Evaluate the Results

• Pupil size: The pupils should remain the same size as the pupils in your original unaltered image—the Red Eye tool will automatically try to keep the pupils the same size, but sometimes the results aren’t 100% accurate.
• Pupil color: The pupils should look natural—not jet black, but also not so light that they appear bluish or purplish.

Step 5: Make Revisions (If Necessary)

• If the pupils look too dark (or not dark enough): Click the arrow to the right of the Darken Amount setting in the Red Eye toolbar and slide the arrow left (to reduce darkness) or right (to increase it). Settings range from 1–100% (lightest to darkest).
• If the pupils look too small (or too large): Click on the arrow to the right of the Pupil Size setting in the Red Eye toolbar and slide the arrow left (to reduce the size) or right (to increase it). Settings range from 1–100% (smallest to largest).