Using the Red Eye Removal Tool

The dreaded red eye in your photos occurs when the light of a flash bounces off the back of the eyeball. This generally occurs when the flash is on the camera or very close to the lens. Red eye is more likely to happen when your subject is in a dark room and the pupils are wide open.

You can solve the problem by moving the flash off your camera or by using an external flash unit that fires when you release the shutter. But, what if you have an older photo with red eye, or you can't move your flash?

Fortunately, Fireworks contains an easy solution the Red Eye Removal tool. With this tool, you can just whisk the red away.

1.	Open the boys_playing.png file from the Media folder within the Lesson01 folder. This file is a picture of two boys with scary red eyes.
2.	Use the Zoom shortcut to magnify the eyes of the boy on the left. Drag a rectangle around the eyes with the tool to isolate just the eyes. Remember, the shortcut is to hold down the spacebar, then add Ctrl (PC) or Command (Mac). When you drag with the Zoom tool (or the Zoom shortcut) you magnify the page to fit within the area you draw.
3.	Select the Red Eye Removal tool from the Tools panel. Move the cross hair pointer to the top left of the left eye and drag over the eye area. As you drag, you see a blue rectangle that defines the area of the eye. When you release the mouse, the red color of the eye should change to a dark gray color. Notice that only the red color within the rectangle changes. You can also adjust some settings for the tool to control the tolerance or strength of the tool. Increasing or decreasing the Tolerance slider widens or narrows the range of the red hues. Strength controls the darkness of the colors that replace the red pixels as you paint with the tool. Drag the sliders on the Property inspector to change the settings.
4.	Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the right eye and the other boy's eyes. The boy on the right has lighter color eyes which means you don't want to use the same strength value as you used for the boy on the left.
5.	Close the file. You don't need to save your changes.