Linux Multimedia Hacks

Remove Red Eye from Photos

Follow a few basic steps with the GIMP to remove red eye from photos.

Red eye happens to the best of us. Nowadays many cameras have red-eye reduction features, but whether you are dealing with older scanned-in photos, or you just forgot to turn on that feature, sometimes you get digital photos that have red eye in them. Since red eye seemingly turns even the sweetest child into demon spawn, you generally want to remove it from your photos before you send them out to relatives. Although it might seem as if you need extensive experience and expensive tools to edit your photos, with the GIMP you can take out red eye in a few simple steps.

The basic steps in this procedure are to select the red area of the eye and then open the channel mixer and change the red, green, and blue values until the red eye looks like a normal pupil. The specifics of these steps are a bit more involved, but as you’ll see, they mostly require a bit of time and tinkering.

Select the Red Eye

First you need to select the red eye. Zoom in your image (hit the + key) until the part of the picture with the red eye is mostly filling the window. There are a number of ways to select the red part of the eye, but the fuzzy selection tool is the easiest to use.

The simplest way to select the red part of the eye is to go into the different color channels and disable all but either the green or the blue color channel. Click File → Dialogues → Channels, and click both the red and blue channels so that ...