While photography has a come a long way in recent years, red-eye is still a problem for most consumer-level cameras. But if you use iPhoto 09 on your Mac to store and catalog your photos, then you can also remove the red-eye effect.

Select a photo in iPhoto and edit it. You can do this by either double-clicking on the photo, or pressing a pencil-icon edit button if one appears under the photo in the mode you are using. Once you are editing the photo, a variety of editing options appear at the bottom of the image.

Press the red-eye button and a small red-eye control will appear near the bottom of the photo with only a few options. The first is an Auto button. If the Auto button is active, it means that iPhoto has been able to identify the red-eye problem in the photo and can try to remove it automatically. Click on the Auto button to give this a try. If the result is not what you wanted, you can always press Command+Z to undo the change.

The other way to get rid of the red-eye effect is to point to the eyes manually. First, use the slider control to adjust the size of the red-eye tool. Try to get it to be only slightly larger than the size of the red circles inside the eyes. You can click and drag the view zoom slider at the bottom right of the iPhoto window to get a closer look at the area with the eyes. Use the little navigation window to position the zoomed area so the eyes are in the middle.

Then, position the tool over the red first red circle and click. If you did not position the circle correctly, then you can use Command+Z to undo and try again. Click in the second eye to finish. Then, click the X button in the red-eye tool to close it.

If red-eye is a constant problem with your photos, you may want to see if your camera supports a red-eye mode, which triggers a small flash before of the main flash so the pupils dilate just before the picture is taken. Many people do not like this double flash, and prefer to remove red-eye later