Lots of people end up with red eyes in photographs, especially blue-eyed people, when the flash is used. But even people with dark eyes can have red eyes in many different situations. There are many ways to fix red eye in GIMP, some which are more automatic, and others which are more manual. Whichever method you use, it’s important not to use the Circle or Ellipse Tools or other pre-formatted shape tool. The eyes are the windows of the soul, and these tools will obliterate the real shape of the eyes of the subject in favor of a geometrical shape that simply isn’t realistic, and doesn’t express their personality.
Automatic Red Eye Removal in GIMP
Before using the automatic red eye removal tool in GIMP, we must first select the eye area with the Free Select Tool. Use CTRL + Click to remove areas from the selection, and SHIFT + Click to add them. Here I have selected the right eye in a photo of my son Jonathan, which was overexposed when it was taken with a digital camera with the flash on.
I actually don’t really like the automatic red eye removal tool, for the reasons I’ll detail below.
Then I selected Enhance – Red Eye Removal from the Filters Menu with the default settings. Here is the result.
Notice that the eye looks very gray. If the subject does not have gray eyes, this is obviously not a very good result. We can run this through some other filters to get a better color. My son’s eyes are dark brown, so I ran the eyes through the Curves Tool from the Colors Menu to try to restore the color.
I brought each channel, red, green, and blue, down slightly as shown below, to create a dark brown color within the selected pixels.
So as you can see, the technique worked to remove the red eyes, but it was far from automatic. It required quite a bit of other work, and it left the edges of the eyes looking rather darker and sharper than the rest of the image. It also failed to address the other problems in the photo, such as the way his entire face and head have been washed out by the flash bulb, and the harsh shadow in the background.
Manual Red Eye Removal in GIMP
Personally, I think a manual technique of red eye removal is better. It really isn’t any harder than using the automatic red eye removal tool, and achieves a better overall result. It’s important to address all the issues in the image, not just the red eyes. So to do my manual technique, I first ran the whole photo through some other filters. First, I used the Brightness-Contrast Tool from the Colors Menu, adjusting the brightness down 15 points, and the contrast up 15 points. Then I used the Hue-Saturation Tool from the same menu to increase the overall color saturation 15 points. I also selected the harsh shadow behind his head with the Free Select Tool, and used the Clone Tool to remove it by selecting the white background as my source image.
Then I selected the eyes again with the Free Select Tool, and used the Hue-Saturation Tool to remove the red eye effect, reducing the saturation 100% and the lightness 74.7%. This gave me more control over the final result of the red eye removal.
Then I used the Curves Tool and brought down the red, green, and blue channels in a staggered tier to create a rich brown color in the eyes, as shown below.
I then selected the highlight on the eyes and increased the brightness by 50 points. Here’s how it turned out.
As you can see, this result is a considerable improvement over the automatic red eye removal, and it really didn’t take that much more work.
Conclusion
Red eye removal in GIMP is really easy, and there are many tools in the program that address this issue. However, it’s important to address all the problems in a photo, not just red eye. It really isn’t hard for the average photographer or computer user to learn to use the features in GIMP to get a satisfying final photo.
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