Using Adjustment Layers to Fix Red-Eye

This tutorial uses the photo of the two small children with bad red-eye that was included as a tutorial image with Paint Shop Pro 7.  That image belongs to Jasc, so it is not posted here for downloading.

1.      Make sure your foreground and background colors are set to black and white.  It doesn't matter which goes where, because each swatch goes with one of your two main mouse buttons - the left swatch goes with the left mouse button and the right swatch goes with the right mouse button.  Set the two colors up whereever it's easiest for you to use them.

2.  Go to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation/Lightness.  Move the saturation slider down as far as it will go.  This will turn your image black and white.  Now go to the "General" tab and set the blend mode to "Multiply".  Your picture will get very dark and murky-looking.  Notice how dark the pupils have become.  The next steps will fix the photo so that the only the pupils remain darkened.
   
   photo with multiply mode applied

   
   

3. Select the Flood Fill tool (the paint bucket).  If you're using PSP 7, check the "lock" box on the color palette first so that you won't have to go back and select the black and white colors all over again.  You can uncheck it after you've selected the tool if you want to.  Flood fill with black.  The color should come back into the image.  If it doesn't look quite right, check your settings.  Make sure you're using black (R, G, and B should all be zero when you click the black swatch) and make sure your paint bucket is set to fill at 100 percent opacity (type the letter O and check your Option Palette settings).

4. Paint over the eyes with white.  I had trouble with the Paint Brush leaving a hard edge no matter what settings I used, so I used a circular marquee to select the pupils instead, using a feather of 2 and with anti-alias checked, and then flood-filled with white.  This gave me a much softer and more natural-looking edge to the pupils.

   Note that in Paint Shop Pro, adjustment layers work very similarly to masks:  painting with white allows the adjustment layer to affect the layer(s) beneath and painting with black blocks it - flood-filling the whole adjustment layer with black blocks the desaturation effect everywhere except for the white "holes" painted in it where the baby's pupils are.

   

   
   

5.  The red still shows a little bit, but is not as glaringly noticeable.