Red eye, or how to make your relatives look as demonic as they truly are, is a common problem for many home photographers. RedEyePro Filter is about as fast a tool as I've seen for removing red eye. However if you want more than turning the red eye into dark gray orbs, you may end up frustrated.

The cause of red eye is actually related to how close a camera's flash is to its own lens. The cheaper and/or smaller the flash camera is, the more likely the subject's eye will shine a brilliant red. This is because the back of the eye (flush with bright red blood) reflects the light from the flash. The closer the flash is to the lens the more likely the lens will pick up the reflection. That's why professional photographers typically have a separate flash unit attached to the camera (or even held separate off to the side). In this configuration, red eye is almost impossible.

Some amateur cameras have a "red-eye removal" setting for the flash which flutters the flash a few moments prior to the real flash going off. The intent here is to cause the pupil to contract as much as possible decreasing the amount of light getting into the eye and hopefully decreasing the angle of reflection to decrease the chance of red eye. Typically these just make for a smaller red eye but tend not to eliminate the problem.

In short, if you want to not have red eye to deal with, get a camera with the ability to plug in a separate flash unit. Outside of that, get Photoshop. Another option on top of that is to also get RedEyePro.

You open RedEyePro by selecting it from the Filter menu in Photoshop. The window is fairly easy to maneuver. There are no tool pop-ups because Andromeda provides an explanation panel below the main image when you hold your mouse over any given tool.

There are two modes for RedEyePro, Novice Mode and Expert Mode. The basic use is the same, but the Expert has more options.

Below are the two modes, Basic on the left and Advanced on the right. (The screen shot above shows the Advanced mode.)

To use RedEyePro, one simply zooms into the image to get a good image of the errant eye and then click on it with the "eye" icon. If you like the result you click the "Apply" button. Internally, RedEyePro is looking for red and desaturates it. That's it.

[Desaturation simply removes color, just like if you select Image (menu) - Adjustments -> Desaturate.]

In the advanced mode you can fine tune the color selection by clicking with the eye-dropper to select the color to "look" for (especially good with an animal's "green-eye" or the like). In addition, brushes are provided to deal with non-round eyes (e.g., animal eyes or half closed eyes).

The big question is how well does it work. The answer is not bad if you are in a hurry and will accept gray eyes. Consider:

On the left is the original image. On the right is 10 seconds of work with RedEyePro. Some things to note: Notice the eyes are now gray. That's what desaturate does--it removes color.

Please note that I didn't decrease the activity box around the eye sufficiently (a simple thing to do really--I left the box expanded to show one of the potential problems), causing some of the red pixels in the face to be desaturated as well. To the right is a "proper" fix with the bounding box set to the best size.

Also note the subjects right eyes still has some latent red. This is because RedEyePro is looking for a specific hue and shade of red and if there are a range of red colors in the eye, not all of them will be desaturated.

The other limitation with RedEyePro is if one wishes to maintain the brown, blue, or green of the person's eye, you can't do it. Period. Desaturate means remove color not replace color.

I've counted a variety of ways to remove red eye in Photoshop and they all focus around either desaturating or replacing the red color--most of the variations deal with how to select the errant color. Generally I use two approaches: one is to take the Marquee too (round) and select the offending red area. Feather the selection .3 - 1 pixel depending on the images resolution and select Desaturate as mentioned above. You are done. The biggest problem here is how good is your ability to select things like eyes and deciding on the amount of feathering can be trial and error.

Assuming you are good at selecting eyes and want to go to the next level, you select the eye just as you did above, but save the selection on a separate layer. Do both eyes in separate layers because seldom are the eyes the same color red.

With the eye layer active, bring up the Hue/Saturation window and shift the hue of the red to orange. Then using desaturate and lighten (darken) to make it brown. If you bring the red to blue or green, you can restore the eye to whatever color you want.

However, you will also notice that the pupil is gone when you do this. To resurrect the pupil, you need to make a 2nd selection on the eye where you guess the pupil is located on the iris, feather the selection, and bring this into its own layer (be sure to do this over the background layer and also be sure to drag the layer above the eye layers you created earlier. Again using the Hue/Saturation window, blacken/darken the pupil. The hard part is to align the pupil so it appears the subject's eye is pointing the desired way. Hint, very slightly cross-eyed makes the eyes appear they are looking at something. (Too much and you've made an enemy.)

Below is some samples of this approach. This approach gives you the option for what color eyes you want the subject to have.

On the other hand, these two images took about 5-6 minutes of futzing. RedEyePro took 10 seconds--really.

In short, the value of RedEyePro is in the value of your time and how anal you are. If RedEyePro were $19 I could easily recommend it. At $39 its a bit steep for me to wholly recommend it considering it's not all that hard to remove red eye. Besides, the techniques to remove red eye can be applied to so many other techniques and procedures in Photoshop that they provide good practice. On the other hand, I've never seen anything remove red eye faster than RedEyePro filter. If your time is money, this can save you bundles.

• LensDoc Filter
• ScatterLight Lenses
• VariFocus Filter
• Perspective Filter

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