Red-Eye Removal

Red-eye is the mark of a certain kind of photograph: a compact camera, a flash mounted close to the lens, a dim room, and everybody looking straight at it. The flash lights up the blood vessels at the back of the eye before the pupil has a chance to close, and the print comes back with glowing red pupils on the whole family. Christmas mornings, birthday cakes, the 1980s and 1990s in general. Red-Eye Removal restores what the eyes actually looked like: a natural dark pupil, the person's own iris color around it, and a small catchlight so the eye still looks alive rather than painted black. The correction is small and local, and the rest of the photograph is not touched at all.

There are no options to set, because there is only one right answer. The AI finds every affected eye in the frame, including pets whose eyes tend to glow green or white rather than red, and corrects each one while leaving everything else alone. It is told to keep the person's real iris color, which it infers from any part of the iris that survived the flash and from the person's coloring, so a blue-eyed child does not come back brown-eyed. Expression, eyelids, lashes and everything around the eyes stay as photographed. A room full of people all looking at the camera is handled in one pass, with each pair of eyes corrected on its own, and the odd person who blinked or looked away is left as they were.

This works on a scan of a print, on a scan of a negative, and on an original digital file from an early camera. Results keep the shape of the upload and return in seconds. Because a flash photo often has a washed-out face and a hard shadow behind it as well, the Exposure Fixer on its Harsh flash setting is a natural second step, and the Studio can chain the two. Prints from that era were often small and glossy, so a scan at 600 dpi is worth the trouble; it gives each eye enough pixels for the AI to place a natural pupil and catchlight rather than a dark dot. The original file is kept as uploaded, so nothing is lost by trying.