The Easy Way to Get Rid of Red Eye

By Mike Panic on 23 Apr 2010 in Post Production, Shooting[ 4 Comments ]

I think everyone has seen the dreaded red-eye in photos, mostly effecting those with light eyes and animals. The red eye effect is caused when the camera’s flash is very close to the camera lens, most commonly seen with point and shoot cameras, this effect is purely a photographic one and never occurs under normal lighting conditions in nature. While point and shoot cameras are the most common culpret, DSLR shooters who use the pop-up flash often see similar results. There are two easy ways to get rid of red eye that all photographers should know how to do.

Photo by ribena_wrath

Prevent it before it even happens. By using a hot-shoe mounted flash on your DSLR or better, a flash bracket, you physically move the flash further away from the lens, thus eliminating red-eye from happening. For you point and shoot users out there, take your camera off auto-flash mode and put it into anti-red eye mode. When you do this, tell the people who you are taking photos of that there will be two flashes and the second one is what counts. Emitting a pre-flash during this mode in the camera drastically helps reduce red eye from occurring.

Fix it after the fact fast. Starting in Photoshop CS2 and getting better with each more current version, a red eye tool has been included. Simply select this tool and click on the effected red eye and Photoshop will fix it for you. For particularly bad cases, draw a box around the effected area. Photoshop does an absolutely stunning job fixing this. Don’t own a copy of Photoshop? Not to worry, Gimp is free and also has a red eye removal tool built in that can be accessed by going to Filters -> Enhance -> Red Eye Removal.

Don’t let red eye ruin your next photo and easily remove it from older images you’ve already taken!

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4 Comments

Do You Commit These 7 Photoshop Crimes? | Light Stalking:

[...] be used to black and white, sepia and other color conversions, selective color, blemish removal and removing red eye. With every release of Photoshop, more tools are available, making the toolbox grow and the editing [...]

May 8, 2010 at 2:43 pmReply
The 7 Deadly Sins of Indoor Photography | Light Stalking:

[...] also strongly suggest a flash bracket to get the flash further away from the lens and reduce red-eye. Bounce the flash off a wall, ceiling or, if none are available, utilize an Omni-Bounce or [...]

June 1, 2010 at 3:11 pmReply
The 7 Deadly Sins of Indoor Photography:

[...] I’d also strongly suggest a flash bracket to get the flash further away from the lens and reducered-eye. Bounce the flash off a wall, ceiling or, if none are available, utilize an Omni-Bounce or [...]

November 15, 2010 at 12:36 amReply
Alexander:

Is it just me that thought that those eyes where pretty cool!

November 16, 2010 at 6:31 amReply