Judging by the number of layouts featuring our furry and feathered friends that appear in the galleries on a daily basis, I think it’s safe to say that we scrappers consider our pets to be an important part of the memories we keep. Pet photography comes with its own special challenges. Perhaps the most common (and frustrating) is the demonic “green eye” that so often results when using a flash in low light conditions. Most photo editing software these days has special tools for quickly and easily removing red eye from your photos. Unfortunately, these tools don’t work very well on the glowing white, green, or yellow eye reflections that you often get when taking photos of pets. This tutorial will take you through the steps to quickly “paint over” those problem areas with Photoshop. I snapped this shot of my son, Dave and his pal Buddy in low light conditions using the onboard flash on my Digital Rebel. Cute shot…but Buddy came out looking more like a demon dog than the sweet natured pup he is!
Step 1: Open your image and zoom in on the pet’s eyes.
Step 2: Create a new empty layer. (Layer>New>Layer.) Name this layer “eyes.”
Step 3: Choose a medium-soft edged brush in a size slightly larger than the problem pet eye area from the toolbox. (Hint: After choosing a beginning size, move your brush over the problem area and use the bracket keys to customize the size to fit the area. The left bracket decreases the brush size and the right bracket increases the size.)
Step 4: Make sure that your foreground color is set to black and the background color is set to white. Pressing the letter “D” key will quickly restore these default colors if necessary.
Step 5: Working in the new “eyes” layer that you added, click several times in the glowing problem area in each eye with your soft edged brush using the black foreground color. The eyes will look flat and lifeless at this stage because there is no “gleam” of light reflected in them. We’ll take care of that in the next step!
Step 6: Temporarily hide the “eyes” layer by clicking the eye icon next to the layer in the layers palette.
Step 7: Set your paintbrush to a small, hard edged brush approximately 3-5 pixels in size.
Step 8: Set your foreground paint color to white.
Step 9: Add a new blank layer above the “eyes” layer. (Layer>New>Layer.) Name this layer “gleam.”
Step 10: With the “eyes” layer hidden, you should be able to see the original photo. Click once with the paintbrush directly over each eye glint in the original. In some cases, the reflection is so bad that you won't be able to find the original eye glints. In those cases you’ll need to ‘guesstimate” where the gleam should be based on the direction of the light and how other reflections appear in the photo.
Step 11: Reveal hide the “eyes” layer by clicking the eye icon next to the layer in the layers palette.
Step 12: Merge all three layers together by choosing Layer>Flatten Image and
save your file.
Here’s Buddy looking much more like a sweet-tempered Lab pup than a demon dog! (Now if I could just figure out how to get that stuffed Grinch behind Dave’s head out of the photo it would be a winner.)
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