Avoiding Pet Reflections: Enhancing Your Animal Portraits Perfectly

Most photo editing software offers tools forremoving red-eye from pictures . However, these tools don’t always work on pets since they can have yellow, white, red, or green eyes in photos taken in low-light conditions with a flash. Learn how to fix glowing pet eyes inGimp ,Photoshop , and similar programs.

Instructions in this article apply broadly to all desktop photo editing software.

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How to Fix Pet Eyes in Your Photos

The following screenshots come from Gimp, anopen-source image editor forWindows ,Mac , andLinux , but the general process is the same for other programs. Open the image in your editing software and follow these steps:

1. Create a new transparentlayer in your document, making sure theMode is set toNormal .
   
2. Select thepaintbrush tool and choose a medium-soft edge brush. Set the foreground color to black, and set the size slightly larger than the eye pupil.
   You might need to use an elliptical brush shape when dealing with cat eyes.
   
3. Zoom in and click on each eye to paint over the pet eye reflections. You might need to click a few times with the paintbrush to cover the entire problem area. At this point, the eye will look strange because there is no glint of light reflection in the eye.
   
4. Temporarily hide the layer where you painted black over the eye in the last step. In Gimp, select theeye icon next to the layer in theLayers palette.
   
5. To make the eyes look natural, replace the reflected points of light you painted over in the previous steps. Select a hard-edge brush, set the size to very small (about 3 to 5pixels ), and set the foreground color to white.
   
6. Create another transparentlayer in the document above all other layers in the document. With the painted layer hidden, you should be able to see the original photo. Make a note of where the glints appear in the original photo and click once with the paintbrush directly over each eye glint in the original.
   
7. Unhide the black paint layer to see the final result. If it doesn’t look natural, clear the layer, and keep trying. If the image is acceptable, save and export it to your preferred image format.
   
   You can add a slight amount of Gaussian blur on the black paint layer to blend the pupil into the iris. Use the eraser tool to clean up the black paint that went outside of the eye area onto your pet’s fur.

In some cases, the pet eye is so bad that you can’t find the original eye glints. You’ll have to guess where they should be based on the direction of the light and how other reflections appear in the photo. Keep both eye glints in relation to each other for both eyes. If you can’t make a solid guess on the location of the glints, start with the centers of the pupils.

Beate Zoellner/Getty Images

What Causes Pets’ Eyes to Glow?

The various color glows you see when taking photos of your pets is actually because of how their eyes are designed. To see better in lower light, many animals have this reflective layer that, when light passes through it, reflects back, giving your pet a chance to see better in the dark. So when you take all those snapshots of Rover or Fluffy, that flash could cause their eyes to glow.

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