Tutorial: Page (1) of 3 - 01/09/05

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Working with Photoshop's Channel Mixer Eliminating red eye .. or green eye ... or yellow eye By Dave Nagel Any number of consumer-level graphics applications out there provide you with one-click red-eye reduction for your photographs. But with Adobe Photoshop, you can use the advanced Channel Mixer to take out colors more precisely, whether its the red in a person's eye or the green or yellow in an animal's eye. And you can use Actions in Photoshop to automate the process.

Getting out the color blemish
The nice thing about the Channel Mixer is that it allows you to adjust your image manually, instead of relying on preset color reduction methods, so you can fix images that might give other applications a little trouble. Plus you can select colors other than red for fixing up images that contain "yellow eye" or "green eye," which can occur when photographing animals with a flash.



To begin, open up a photo that has a red-eye problem. Select the Magic Wand tool, and set the Tolerance to about 32. You will be using this tool to select the red portions of the eyes that are giving you trouble. If you're unable to select the proper portion of the eye using the Magic Wand tool, try adjusting the Tolerance up (to select more of the image) or down (to select less of the image).



Click on the first eye in your image to select the red portion. Then hold down the Shift key and click on the second eye to select the red portion.



In order to be able to do this more effectively, you might want to hide the marquee lines surrounding your selection. You can do this by choosing View > Show > Selection Edges to uncheck this option. (I do this so often that I've assigned a keyboard shortcut. You can assign your own, if desired, by choosing Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.)



Now call up the Channel Mixer. It's located at Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. By default, the Red channel will be active, showing a value of "+100%."

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