Correcting Red-Eye like a Pro

1. crisderaud14 April 2011, 22:16 GMT +02:00

Wait, fixing red-eye like a pro? True, professional photographers, with their fancy equipment, probably don’t end up with glowing-eyed subjects very often (if ever). But the fact is, if you’re using the camera at hand, and it happens to be a compact device with the flash and lens element in close angles to one another, anyone might end up with red-eye in their portraits. And what Deke demonstrates in this week’s technique is how to fix red-eye like a pro. That is, as a professional Photoshop retoucher.

And yes, this involves avoiding Photoshop’s red-eye tool altogether. Deke starts by showing you how to create a nuanced mask using the Calculations command and painting with an overlay brush to select the subtle outlines of blown-out pupils. Then he employs the Channel Mixer to rid the selected pupils of their redness. The result, as you can see below, allows for nice dark pupils with nothing but the spark of a natural spectral highlight. (And along the way, you get a cool zombie-like effect during the mask-creation process.)

http://www.deke.com/content/deke’s-techniques-015-correcting-red-eye-a-pro