Removing Red Eye
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.
