How to Remove Red Staining on a White Dog

Certain types of dogs are prone to excessive tearing, causing red stains on the fur of thier faces. The following is a short tutorial on how to remove red staining on a dogs face in Photoshop. Original Photo taken in studio at A Dog’s Life Photography. ISO 100, F-8, S-1/250.

This pretty litle Bolgnese’s name is Brie. It was pretty hot in my Phoenix studio the day she came to visit and she was panting a lot. To get her tongue to stay in her mouth, her mom gave her a hot-dog treat. That did the trick of retracting her tongue but now we were left with a hot dog sticking out of her mouth. Although I think it’s cute, her mom preferred that we remove it from the photo along with the red staining on her white fur.

Let’s start by cleaning up the background to make it a solid black because the light spill is really bugging me. To do this, grab the Magic Wand tool with a tolerance of 10 to select different areas of the background until almost all of the blinking areas (meaning that they have not been selected) are selected.  Then click Select/Modify/Feather and enter a Feather Radius of 3 pixels. This will soften the edge of the selection just enough so that the division between the fur and the background looks pretty natural.

Then fill in your selection with black by clicking Edit/Fill then choose Black. To blend the edges of the fur into the background even more, select the burn tool at about 10% exposure and brush over the areas that you think need to blend better.

To remove the red in the fur, create a new Selective Color Adjustment layer by clicking on the half black/half white circle in the bottom of the layers panel.

In the Reds category, bring the Magenta & Yellow down to -100. (Note this will be different for every dog. Just play with the color adjustments until the reds are almost gone and the rest of the fur color is not affected).

A layer mask will automatically be created within the adjustment layer. Since you only want the red areas to be changed by this adjustment layer, you can click on the layer mask and then hit Ctrl-I to invert the color of the layer mask from white to black. This will make your adjustments temporarily disappear.

You will then want to paint back in your adjustments to only the red fur areas by selecting a soft edge brush with your foreground color set to white.

Now that the staining is gone in the fur, all we have left to do is to remove the cookie. To do this, flatten the image then click on the lasso tool and draw a selection around the other half of the dog’s mouth. Click Select/Modify/Feather and your feather selection of 3 pixels should be defaulted into the dialog box. Click OK then Control-J to duplicate the selection of the mouth into a new layer. Click Edit/Transform/Flip Horizontal to flip the half mouth selection and then move it over to cover the half of the mouth with the cookie.

Flatten the image then use the healing brush to blend the newly pasted mouth side in with the original photo and Voila!… you’re done.

Feel free to shoot me a message is you would like a copy of the “before” file if you would like to try this tutorial out on your own.