"Patti Nykamp" wrote in message
[…] Can someone explain step by step how to pick the color you want to
put in the eye?
The red eye tool can produce some pretty subtle results at first, especially when you’ve never used it before. Four things are important:
* "Tolerance" controls how close to the original "red" (or "green") a color needs to be before Elements will adjust the color
* The "replacement" color is the color that will be used as a substitute for the "red" color.
* The "red" color can be selected when you first click the tool in your image. There’s a checkbox that controls this behavior, and I think it’s set to "First click" by default.
* The red eye tool has a brush, just like some of the other tools. If your brush is too small, it may be hard to see any results at first, and it may be hard to get complete coverage over the "red" part.
You can pick any color as the replacement color, but I’ve found that black (the default) works just great.
As far as "tolerance" goes, for most things I’ve found that numbers in the low tens (10-30 or so) seem to work well. Basically, if you find the tool is leaving some part of the "red" unchanged, you need a higher number, and if you find that the tool is modifying areas outside the "red" (such as the iris), you need a lower number.
I like have a brush size that’s about half the size of the pupil, but this really depends on how steady a hand you have and how long you want to spend fixing the eye. With the tolerance set correctly, it shouldn’t matter if you can’t quite keep "in the lines" with the brush.
Click in the "red" part, trying to aim for a pixel that’s roughly in the middle of the range of "red" shades in the pupil. Without letting up on the mouse button, drag the brush around the pupil. For each pixel, the tool will use the hue of the replacement color in place of the existing pixel’s hue to come up with a new color that will replace the current color of that pixel.
Some notes:
* You’ll find that, because of the way it works, this tool doesn’t deal with "red eye" that’s really just a really bright white. You just get a really bright shade of black (or whatever you chose for your replacement color), which turns out to be not a lot different (if at all) from the original white.
* I put "red" in quotes everywhere, because it doesn’t matter what color the "red eye" really is (unless it’s bright white). The tool works equally well on people, cats, dogs, whatever.
Pete
