How to solve the red eye problem and why your pictures don’t turn out normal
Every digital camera owner will at some point meet the red eye problem. It is when the light from your camera flash bounces off the eye of man or woman your shooting. That is one of the number one things that can ruin your otherwise perfect picture. I bet you feel that it is annoying, and won’t encourage you as a hobby photographer to take lots of pictures of people. The technical reason for this happening is that the person you are shooting has his or her eyes wide open, which will lead to reflection of light from the pupil and back at the camera. People will end up having red eyes, where animal are more likely to get green eyes.
Now many digital cameras will have some sort of red-eye reduction function. There is then probably an option to turn this feature on or off. Today’s tip consists of making sure that you have it on at all times, only when you are in a situation where you will have direct sunlight should you turn it off. If you’re wondering about just how the red eye function works, then let’s just break it down to the basics. It works by quickly flashing a very little burst of light right at the person you are taking a picture of, right before the moment where the actual picture is taken. This short burst of light will make your subject’s pupil to close, which will make it less likely that the flash on your camera will reflect off the retina or pupil. Of course then the chance for you ending up with a red-eye photo is greatly reduced.
It is very common to think that the solution to this problem is found in photo editing software programs. This is just partly true, because there are many programs out there that will not make the eyes of your subjects appear normal. These programs use filters that most likely won’t do you much good for pictures of pets with green eyes. A recommend program though is Photoshop, which has come a long way when it comes to fixing red eyes. The best trick to avoid red or green eyes in your photos is by do a good job to begin with.
Some other good tips to avoid it, is to think about how you are pointing your camera at your subject. Try to avoid pointing your digital camera directly at the eyes, instead try to bounce some of the flash on the nearby wall, or other objects close-by, reducing the chance of red-eye on your subject.
The final red eye removal solution is this: If you have a version of Photoshop, you can just follow the tutorial here:
Red Eye Removal in Photoshop
If you don’t have Photoshop (which is a little expensive piece of software), here is two free programs that will do the same.
Red Eye Reduction with Gimp
Finally I found this little software that I also can recommend called “Better JPEG”.
Made particularly for this kind of problem. Hope you have learned something here now; have fun turning your darlings from demons to angels.
