Saturday School - Pet "Green Eye" removal

Hi everyone. Kiki here with my first tutorial on Saturday with Jennifer's team. I'm going to show you a technique I use all the time since I take a lot of pictures of my pets. So we all know that Photoshop has an automatic red eye removal, but what can you do for that dreaded "glowing green eye" that you get from taking pictures of pets? Here's a solution that you may find works for you. I use it pretty regularly and am so glad that I learned how to take care of this because rarely do I get that great shot without the green eye. Are you ready?

Okay, so step one is to open up your photo in Photoshop and get your Layers Palette ready because we'll be working with that.

I've opened up a picture of my dog, Nanouk. This is straight out of the camera. Now you see what I'm talking about with the dreaded green eye.


Now what we are going to do to get rid of the green eye is cover it with a layer of black with a round brush at 0% hardness right over the green part of the eye. To do this, we'll create a new layer first and place it above the original picture.

For this next step I zoom in close so that I can make sure that I'm only covering the green and not his beautiful brown eyes.

Now, with your brush, and making sure that you are on the new layer, brush or click your round brush until you see no more green underneath. You'll notice that the more you click, the wider the brush extends and it blends pretty well. You can do both eyes on one layer.


Now this looks very odd because the colour is flat and too dark. There's no shine to his eyes. His natural eyes would normally have a glint of white light in them from the flash or surrounding light. So let's add this by creating another layer above the black one and we'll use a soft white brush this time to imitate the catch light in his eyes. The best way I find to do this is to make the black layer invisible for a moment so that I can see where the original catch light was in the first place. Then with my new layer for the white brush selected, I brush with a small white brush right over the original light. You'll obviously need to use a very small brush for this so that it only covers the original glint of light in his eyes.


So now I've got the white brushed over the catch lights and now I can make my black brush layer beneath it visible again for the final result.



I hope you all found this useful for your pet photos. This has saved more than a few of mine with just a few easy steps. It's a little trickier with cats because of their almond shaped eyes, but really all you need to do is make sure that you've brushed over all the green area with a soft brush so that it is covered with the black. Then follow the same steps to recreate the catch lights in the eyes.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you did, I'd love to see your before and after pics, so leave me a comment with links so that I can check them out. Thanks everyone and have a great weekend!