Photography Magazine

The red eye syndrome on photographs is a common problem. If you do not know what it is, it is the bright red appearance of the pupil or both pupils, in certain photographs where flash light was used to illuminate the subject. There are a few ways around this problem. Let us understand first, what causes the red eye. In low light conditions, the pupils of the eye expand much like the aperture of your camera’s lens, so as to allow more light to fall on the retina. This forms a brighter image where light levels are not sufficient to do so on the ‘film’ of the eye - the retina. When the eye experiences brighter light, the pupils contract (like a smaller aperture) to accomodate the increase in light, and therefore this expansion and contraction of the pupils is constantly taking place as we experience varying light intensities. Now, the flash on the camera is obviously used in low light levels. Keeping in mind that the pupils of the eyes of the subject were already expanded in such a scenario, the eyes are not prepared for the unnatural burst of light. In such case, if and when the flash and the eyes are near-parallel or parallel to ach other, the flash light hits the retina, and bounces off it to create the red eye. The redness is of course, thanks to the color of blood within the retina. A little bit on how it can be avoided -

Solution 1:

Try and NOT have the eyes and the flash parallel to each other. In other words, do not shoot directly into the subject’s eyes while using flash. Chances are, you will have a red eye effect on your photograph if you do.

Solution 2:

If you already have an image with red eyes, do not worry. We have Photoshop to the rescue as usual. Open the image in Photoshop (File>Open). Select the red area in both eyes using the lasso tool. Give your selection a sufficient feather effect. Now, simply play with the Hue/Saturation/Lightness option (Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation) to remove the red eye, in a most natural looking fashion.

Solution 3:

Certain cameras have a built in red eye reduction feature. This simply means that the camera’s flash fires one or two times before the shutter release/final exposing flash. The reason for this is, the initial bursts of light tune the eyes of the subject into the bright light levels condition. Thanks to this, the pupils contract, and the eyes are no longer taken by surprise when the final image is photographed. More often than not, this method does not leave room for the red eye. However, in some cases, when the camera flash and the eyes are parallel to each other, a speck of red eye may still be visible. But do keep in mind, this method also consumes more battery power thanks to the extra bursts of flash per image.

Correcting colors on an image is one of the most widely used applications of photo-correcting software. Let us take a closer look at how and why this can be done.

The truth is, that any digital camera, however much effort has been put into its color correction and white balance settings; creates a color cast under certain situations. This is thanks to the different ‘color temperatures’ of different kinds of lights.  For example, our everyday tube lights have a ‘cooler’ tone as compared to the ‘warm tone’ bulb lights from incandescent light sources. No auto white balance setting can be so perfect (at least not till today) that it can accommodate changes for a variety of light sources such as fluorescent, neon, bulb, tube light and daylight. Most cameras perform well under daylight. So what do you do when you get an image with a color cast? Well, you open Adobe Photoshop!

Check this image out for instance. The skin tones clearly tell you that it has a yellowish and unnatural tone. Well, we open the image in Photoshop, and then open the color corrections option. In fact it is called color balance in Photoshop, and you can reach this panel under IMAGE-ADJUST-COLOR BALANCE-

This shows you a sliding tool. In fact it shows you 3 sliding adjustments wherein you can adjust the red, green and blue tones - consequently adjusting their complimentary tones of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow respectively. Consider the image in question. We have declared that it has a markedly yellowish tone. This is obviously due to the fact that it was photographed under something like bulb light with the camera’s white balance set to daylight. Most compact camera users never fiddle with the camera’s white balance settings, and this is exactly what you can expect as a result. Anyway, we declare that it has a yellow tone simply by looking at the image.

Once you have the sliding tool open under the COLOR BALANCE option on Photoshop, we need to reduce the yellow. In other words, we increase the blue. Either way you look at it, it has the same effect on the image nevertheless. When we reduce the yellow (and a bit of red as well), the image begins to look much better - in fact we have adjusted it to clearly look much better, almost as if it were photographed under daylight -

 Do keep in mind that the color correction tools cannot have an effect over the exposure (or the brightness level) of the images. It simply replaces one color tone with another of your choice. However, the wrong color balance at times does seem to look like there is a problem with exposure.

Photoshop also has an auto color correct option. Look under IMAGE menu (IMAGE-ADJUST-AUTO COLOR). This works very well at times, but we have learned that one can get much better results by doing the correction manually using the above described process.