How to Remove Red Eye from Your Photos

What Causes Red Eye? Understanding what causes red eye is actually pretty simple. When you use the flash on your camera to brighten a dark setting the light from the flash is reflected off the retina in the subject's eyes, and believe it or not – the retina appears red! The reason that red eye doesn’t occur so frequently in brighter lighting conditions is because the pupils of the human eyes aren’t open enough in such conditions to allow enough light in to reflect off the retina, so the quickest way to reduce red eye is to add some more light to the scene before taking a photograph. Obviously this isn’t always possible - or desirable - so if red eye does occur in your photos then the following sections can help you to reduce and remove it. Repositioning The Flash Another quick method of reducing red eye is to move the flash further away from the camera’s lens. When light is emitted from the flash and bounces off the subject’s retina a large amount of it then proceeds to travel straight back towards the flash - meaning that a lot will be heading straight for the lens on most cameras. Using a mounted flash on top of your camera or positioning the flash at a distance will help to keep red eye to a minimum, although this may not be possible on a camera that doesn’t accept a mounted flash. Letting The Camera Do The Work Most if not all digital cameras have several flash modes, and one of them is usually targeted towards reducing red eye. Setting your camera’s flash to the red eye mode will cause your camera to use the flash several times before actually taking the photograph. This can help to reduce red eye because it makes the irises in the eyes of your subject contract the size of the pupils, meaning less light will be reflected back towards the camera lens from the retinas. Although this can help to reduce red eye, it does not always get rid of it completely. Healing Red Eye With Image Editors So you have tried all of the above precautions but you are still seeing red eye in some of your photos - don’t give up yet! - Image editors such as Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro can help you to correct the red eye in your photos with relative ease. With Photoshop you can create a duplicate layer of the original image and remove all red colors before using an image mask to make the repaired eyes visible, and Paint Shop Pro has a red eye removal feature built-in which can make the whole process even less time consuming. At last you can completely remove all traces of red eye from your photos! Copyright by http://www.basic-digital-photography.com