Troubleshooting Photos –
Subject's Eyes Are Red
Problem
People or animals have luminous red dots instead of eyes.
It's a car show, so the glare from the lights seems blinding – but it's relatively dark in a car, so the boys' pupils are open wide and ready to reflect the flash. The red image has classic red-eye – nice LED-red dots where you expect dark pupils. Software does a nice job of fixing it, but as seen in normal, it's not perfect. In some situations, the darkening spreads beyond the eye, as with the right eye of the boy in the passenger seat, who now has what looks like a black eye. If you really want to avoid correcting red eyes, there are a few suggestions at the bottom of the page.
What should you look for?
You don't have to look hard – people and pets look like players in low-budget horror movie with bright red pupils. It mainly happens when you take a flash picture of people or pets in low light (relative to the brightness of the flash, so even a normally lit room may be dark enough to trigger the effect).
When the light is low, the pupil of the eye opens up to create a large light-path to the back of the eyeball. Light from the flash reflects off this red surface and returns to the camera as an eerie red.
What should you do?
This is such a common problem that it's easy to fix – though it's arguably easier to avoid it in the first place (arguably, because some people claim that red-eye reduction in software is so easy, it's not worth worrying about when shooting; the countervailing view is that the in-your-face flash that causes red-eye is so unflattering that red-eye is simply a part of the problem, not the problem itself). This is one area where the simpler photo-editing applications used to out-perform professional programs, because pros aren't supposed to take photos with red-eye. Now, every package has first-rate capability.
If you have an older version of a photo-editing application, just search Google for red-eye reduction or red-eye removal for a tutorial on manual red-eye reduction. Usually these perform the same steps as the automatic functions, but you must do them manually.
How do you fix it?
Red-eye is most noticeable if the light was low when the picture was taken, because low light makes the eye's irises open wide to gather more light. That also opens the eye to accept more light from your flash, and bounce back more red light to the camera. Therefore, the most direct solution is to get people's irises to narrow down. Do this by:
- reading your camera's manual to see if it has red-eye reduction, a low-power pre-flash that makes people's irises close down just before the main flash and exposure (many cameras have this, but it is often off when you buy the camera, because it increases battery consumption);
- increasing room or area lighting before you take pictures to make your subject's eyes iris down;
- asking people to look at a bright light together just before you take the picture (potentially distracting, but it works because it takes a minute for their irises to open up again);
- take several pictures one after another, so the flash will force people's irises to narrow (warn them first, so they don't all run off after the first shot).
A few other gotchas and warnings:
- If you've set your camera to use the red-eye reduction pre-flash, warn your subject or subjects that there will be a pre- and main flash, so they shouldn't move until the main, plus you have to remember not to move your camera until after the main flash;
- When removing red-eye with software, be careful of the order in which you make changes – when red-eye reduction was applied to this photo after it was lightened, the reduction effect spread all over the boys' faces but when the effect was applied before the lightening, everything went smoothly.
- when the area around the subject's eyes is relatively dark, the un-reddening function may spread over the surrounding area (look at the right eye of the boy in the passenger seat, where the effect was allowed to spread). Simply magnify the eye area, select the eye, then apply red-eye reduction. In extreme cases, you may have to copy the eye to a new file, un-redden it and paste it back.
Technical solutions, which involve spending money, are:
- buy a camera with red-eye reduction (see first bullet, above) ;
- use a camera with a separate flash unit, such as the one below, because the farther away the flash is from the lens, the less light is reflected from within the eye to the lens;
- use that separate flash unit in bounce mode, with or without a separate bounce attachment, to provide a more diffuse light that is less likely to cause red-eye (this has other benefits, as shown in Dark shadows around subject).
