Digital Photography Hacks

Sponge Out Red Eye

What works better than Visine for getting the red out? Photoshop’s desaturating sponge is fast and effective, and it doesn’t sting.

The ancients knew that red eye was caused from drinking too much Barolo, a wine so red it colored your teeth purple. We moderns like to think it has to do with dilated pupils looking directly at a camera whose flash is too close to the lens.

Of all the goodies Photoshop provides, it doesn’t have one of those nifty automatic red-eye-removal tools, or at least there isn’t one called out on the floating Tools palette. Instead, Photoshop gives you a more powerful tool: the desaturating sponge. This hack will show you how to use it.

Why Desaturate?

Red eye is the reflection of the flash off the retina in the back of the eye. Typically, this happens in low-lighting situations, when the pupil is dilated. We want to neutralize the red retina, and let it go back to being the unilluminated body part it really is. That is, we want to lose all the color information, leaving it a dark, gray shadow.

But we don’t want to lose any of those sparkling little highlights near it. Several generations of the Peale family became portrait painters who were famous for dotting the eyes of their subjects (such as George Washington) with a touch of titanium white, just to get the translucent effect of that catch light. Keep the tradition alive. Don’t change the luminance; just change the color.

How to Desaturate

In any version of Photoshop, open the image that ...