Combat Red Eye
Sure-fire tricks for removing the red-eye effect from your photos.Dave Johnson
Feature: Combating Red Eye
Red eye: Everyone hates it, yet it's hard to avoid finding a few examples in every batch of pictures you take. That's unfortunate, especially when you find that an otherwise great picture of a long-distance relative looks like Linda Hamilton's character in the movie Children of the Corn. So what is red eye? How do you avoid it? That's what I'll talk about this week.
Understanding Red Eye
You've seen red eye, of course--but do you know what causes it? Red eye is the term for the effect you get when you use your camera's flash to take pictures of people or animals in low-light situations, such as indoors or outdoors after dark. Here's why: In low light, our eyes are fully dilated to make better use of the limited lighting, and the pupils are opened up to a relatively large diameter. When the camera flash goes off, light reflects off the red retina in the back of the eye, and when it arrives back at the camera it lends the pupils and irises an angry red glow.
Eliminate Red Eye With Your Digital Camera
The easiest way to eliminate red eye is to set your camera's flash to red-eye mode. This setting "pre-flashes" the camera flash before taking the actual picture by firing the flash several times quite rapidly right before the actual exposure, forcing your subjects' irises to throttle down and decreasing the size of the pupil a bit. Usually, that reduces the red-eye effect. This red-eye mode isn't perfect, though, and often can't totally eliminate the effect. That's because the human eye can't adjust to a change in lighting instantly, so the red eye control on your camera usually just reduces the effect--it often doesn't eliminate it.
There are other things you can do to minimize red eye as well. You can avoid shooting in a dark room or outdoors after dark, for instance. Red eye never happens in bright light. If you're ambitious, you might also want to look into getting an external flash for your digital camera. Red eye happens because the flash is very close to the lens, so light reflects directly back into the camera. If you can get the flash farther away from the lens--such as by mounting a flash on the camera's flash mount (called the hot shoe), holding it away from the camera on an extension cable, or "bouncing" the flash off the ceiling--you'll avoid red eye entirely.
Image Editors to the Rescue
Those solutions aren't always feasible, though. So what if you end up with red eye in your photos? Many image editors can easily wipe it out in just a few simple steps. To see how it's done, you can follow along while I use Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 to tweak a photo I took outside one night.
From the menu, choose Adjust, Red-Eye Removal. In the Red-Eye Removal dialog box, you can see two images: the one of the left is the work image where you can apply the effect and the one on the right is a preview of the finished image. Grab the image on the right and drag it around until you can see the eyes. Then use the magnifying glass button on the left to zoom in until one or both eyes fill most of the screen. Be careful not to try dragging the image around by the image on the left, since clicking there will apply the red-eye tool.
Now it's time to apply the red-eye treatment. In the left image, click in the middle of one of the eyes and drag the tool until you've made a circle about the same size as the red portion of the eye. After a moment, you'll see a preview of the new eye on the right image. From there, you can customize the eye by specifying its color, refining its size, and even adding a little glint. If you have a dog or cat with the evil eye, note that Paint Shop Pro even has an animal eye setting. Then repeat the process for the other eye.
Dave's Favorites: Send Pictures Wirelessly With Concord Eye-Q
Have you ever wished that you could dispense with cables and card readers, and simply transfer images from your digital camera to a computer wirelessly? If so, you'll love the Concord Eye-Q Go Wireless.
The Eye-Q is a taste of the future, folks. Sure, it's a small 2-megapixel point-and-shoot camera that costs $179--not a lot of innovation there. But it is the first digital camera I've seen with Bluetooth built in. That means it can transfer pictures wirelessly to any other Bluetooth device within a range of about 30 feet. The camera comes with a Bluetooth USB adapter for your PC, so you can add Bluetooth to your PC essentially for free. It also works flawlessly with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm OS PDA.
Take a picture, press the Transmit button, and the camera looks for any Bluetooth devices in the room. Click one more time, and the image is sent quickly to the other device (it takes just a few seconds). I recently wowed some friends with the ability to snap a picture and then send it almost instantly to my PC and Palm Tungsten T3.
Don't expect to use this camera to become a wireless Ansel Adams: It has a built-in flash, 7MB of internal memory, and a Secure Digital card slot, but there's no optical zoom or programmed exposure modes. It's a simple camera, but it makes a great gift for a new photographer--or an excellent toy for yourself.
Q&A: Can I Increase the Resolution of a Picture?
Is there some way to increase the resolution of a photo? Recently, I was given a floppy disk with seven photos on it. When I opened them in Adobe Photoshop they printed fine as small, billfold-size images, but as soon as I try to do anything larger they look absolutely terrible.
--Mike Vandenberg, Covington, Louisiana
In general, Mike, the answer is no. When a digital image is captured at a certain size, such as 640 by 480 pixels, there's a specific amount of visual information locked into the image file. If you try to increase the picture's resolution, or print it bigger than its ideal print size (between 200 and 300 pixels per inch), all you do is make the pixels bigger. The result is a blurry, blocky mess.
But you can get around this rule, to some extent. There are programs available that allow you to print images much larger than you normally could. However, these programs work best when trying to make high-resolution images really, really large. And even so, they tend to blur and soften the image--you lose any razor sharpness the picture originally had. They're somewhat less successful at making small images bigger. The most famous of this type of program is LizardTech Genuine Fractals. There's a new program, Extensis pxl SmartScale; but I haven't had a chance to try it yet, so I can't say how well it works.
In any event, the best recipe is to always shoot at your camera's highest resolution. And those old, 1997-era digital pictures will simply never look good printed at poster size. Sorry!
Hot Pics
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
This Week's Hot Pic: "Hummer," by Jerry DalFerro, Palmer Lake, Colorado
Jerry is either very patient or very lucky. He says that he keeps about five hummingbird feeders operational, and he goes through about 16 cups of nectar each day. For this photo, he used his Olympus e20n.
Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For our first monthly winner of 2004, we chose "Sentinel Tree," taken by Michael Bale from Wheeling, Illinois.
Congratulations to Michael and to everyone who won the Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!
We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.
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