July 30, 2008

Fixing Pet Eye

Pet EyePet eye is the glowing white, green, red, or yellow eye reflections that you often get when taking photos of pets or other animals in low light conditions when a flash is used.

Because pet eye is not always red, the automatic red eye tools sometimes don’t work well — if at all.

Start by opening your image and zooming in on the pet eye area.
Create a new, empty layer in your document.

Activate your software’s paintbrush tool. Set the brush to a medium-soft edge and a size slightly larger than the problem pet eye area.

Set your paint (foreground) color to black.

Click on each eye to paint over the pet eye reflections. You may need to click a few times with the paintbrush to cover the entire problem area.
At this point the eye will look strange because there is no “glint” of light reflection in the eye. We will add back the glint next.

Temporarily hide the layer where you painted black over the eye in the last step.

Set your paintbrush to a very small, hard brush. Usually you should not need it more than 3-5 pixels.
Set your paint color to white.

Create a new, empty layer above all other layers in your document.

With the painted layer hidden, you should be able to see the original photo. Make note of where the glints appear in the original photo and click once with the paintbrush directly over each eye glint in the original.

Now unhide the blank paint layer, and you should have a much better-looking pet eye!

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