One tool, two problems — and it takes about three seconds
Red-eye happens when a camera flash fires straight into a person's open pupil. The light bounces off the blood vessels at the back of the eye and reflects back red. Pet eye is the same effect, but because cats, dogs, and most other animals have different eye anatomy, the reflection comes back green, yellow, or white instead of red.
Both problems look bad in an otherwise lovely photo. Both are completely fixable in Photoshop Elements, usually with a single click.
The quick route: Auto Red Eye Fix
If you have a portrait with obvious red-eye and you just want it gone immediately, go to Enhance → Auto Red Eye Fix. Photoshop Elements scans the photo automatically, locates the pupils, and corrects them in one step. No clicking on eyes, no adjustments needed.
This works well when the eyes are clearly visible and the flash reflection is a clean red glow. For most family snapshots and group portraits taken indoors with a flash, this is the only step you need.
The precise route: the Red Eye Removal tool
For more control — or when Auto Red Eye Fix misses an eye or overcorrects — use the Red Eye Removal tool directly.
In Expert mode or Quick mode, press Y on the keyboard, or click the eye icon in the toolbar. In Quick mode it also appears in the right-hand panel under Fixes.
You have two options for how to apply it:
- Click directly on the red pupil. Photoshop Elements detects the boundary of the red area and corrects just that region. One click per eye is usually enough.
- Drag a rectangle around the eye. This is more reliable when the pupil is small, the photo is dark, or the eyes are partially closed. Draw a loose box around the whole eye area and release — PSE finds the red within the selection and corrects it.
In the Tool Options bar at the bottom of the screen you will see two sliders:
- Pupil Radius — controls how large a pupil Photoshop Elements looks for. If the correction is cutting off at the edges of the pupil, increase this value. If it is correcting too large an area, reduce it. 50% is a good starting point.
- Darken Amount — controls how dark the corrected pupil becomes. Human pupils are a very dark brown-black, so 50–80% usually looks natural. Going too high makes the pupils look unnaturally black; too low leaves them slightly grey.
Fixing pet eye: cats, dogs, and the green glow
Pet eye is handled by the same tool with one extra step. In the Tool Options bar, tick the Pet Eye checkbox before you click.
With Pet Eye mode on, Photoshop Elements switches from looking for red to looking for the green, yellow, and white reflections that appear in animal eyes. The correction logic is also adjusted — animal pupils vary much more in shape and size than human ones, so the tool is more flexible in what it accepts.
Click directly on the glowing pupil, or drag a rectangle around the eye, exactly as you would for a human portrait. The reflected glow is replaced with a natural dark pupil.
A few tips that make pet eye corrections cleaner:
- Work on one eye at a time. If both eyes are visible but at different angles, click each separately rather than trying to drag a box around both.
- Zoom in first. Go to View → Zoom In or press Ctrl + to enlarge the eye area before clicking. A larger target is easier to click accurately, and you can see immediately whether the correction looks right.
- Adjust Darken Amount for lighter-eyed animals. Some dogs have amber or blue eyes. A Darken Amount of 30–40% preserves a hint of the natural iris colour rather than replacing it with a flat black disc.
Red-eye correction in Quick mode
If you are working in Quick mode, the Red Eye Removal tool is available in the Fixes section of the right-hand panel. Click Auto Fix to let Photoshop Elements find and correct all red-eye in the photo automatically, or click directly on the eyes in the canvas for manual control.
Quick mode is the fastest option when you are making several basic corrections to a photo at once — straightening, lighting, colour, and red-eye in a single session before saving.
Saving after the correction
Red-eye corrections in Expert mode are applied directly to the pixel layer, so there is no separate layer to flatten. Once you are happy with the result, go to File → Save As and save a corrected copy as JPEG — keep your original file untouched in case you want to revisit it later.
The whole process — open photo, press Y, click both eyes, save — takes well under a minute. For most family photos it is one of the fastest fixes Photoshop Elements offers.