Digital Focus: Advanced Red-Eye Removal Tips

Photo Editing Tips

Dave Johnson

Feature: Remove Red Eye From Your Holiday Photos

By now you've had time to root through all those holiday photos and sort them into keepers and trash. What's that, you say? It's already February and you did this weeks ago? Well, I'll let you in on a little secret: I still haven't sorted my holiday pics from 1999, when I got sidetracked stockpiling Gatorade and Spam in preparation for Y2K. So this is right on time for me.

I bet that a lot of your photos have the dreaded red-eye effect. It happens when you use a flash indoors in relatively low light; your subject's pupils open way up to compensate for the dim lighting, and your flash consequently reflects off the retinas. The result is common, but ugly and a little creepy.

You can avoid a lot of red eye by turning on your camera's red-eye mode, which flashes before the actual exposure to helps your subject's eyes adjust to the bright light. You can also eliminate the red eye in an image editor afterwards. Some programs have an automatic red-eye removal feature. If yours doesn't, you can use the following steps to do get the red out manually.

Prepare Your Tools

You can use almost any image editing program; I'll show you how it's done with Paint Shop Pro. Load an image with red eye into the program and then zoom in until the eyes fill most of the screen. If you want to experiment with my family instead of yours, save this file to your hard drive and then open it.

Start by choosing the Paint Brush from the toolbar (it's about halfway down the toolbar and looks like a typical paint brush). Make sure that its shape is set to round in the Tool Options dialog box. If you don't see the Tool Options dialog box on screen, right-click on the toolbar and choose Tool Options to open it.

Next, set the size of the brush to approximately the diameter of a red eye in the photo. In my sample photo, 12 pixels is just about right, but you'll have to experiment to find the right size for your photos. To test, just dab the brush in the center of the eye and see if you cover all of--but not more than--the red area. Select Edit, Undo Paintbrush between tries.

Pick the Colors

Now it's time to set the foreground and background colors for the brush. We want the foreground color to be dark, perhaps even black. You can set it to pure black (just click in the black part of the color palette on the right side of the screen), but you'll often get a more realistic effect by setting the foreground to the darkest part of the subject's hair. To do that, choose the Dropper tool (it's the eyedropper in the toolbar) and click in a dark region of the subject's hair.

The background color needs to be white, so select the second box right under the color palette on the right side of the screen and then right-click in the white region of the color palette.

Dab Those Eyes

Now we're ready to get rid of the red. If you need to re-select the paint brush, do that now. Then position the brush over a red eye and click to stamp it black. You may need to stamp it more than once to eliminate the red.

Add Some Blur

Now for a special trick that'll add a bit of realism to this digital trickery. Most eyes aren't a solid blob of color, but are instead a blend of several colors. To achieve a similar effect, select the region you just stamped by dragging the Magic Wand tool from the toolbar (yes, it looks like a magic wand) and clicking in one of the now-dark eyes. Hold down Shift and click around if you don't get all of it the first time; right-click when you're satisfied that you have it all. Choose Effects, Blur, Gaussian Blur from the menu and click OK to let the effect kick in. You should see that the eye now has some color variations, more like a real photo. If you didn't select the other eye at the same time, go back and select the other eye to blur it as well.

And Now for Some Glint

When you're done blurring the eyes, go to the Tool Options dialog box and change the brush size to about 2 pixels, then click to add the white glint in the center of the eye. For a final touch, you can use the Magic Wand to select the glint and blur it as well. That's all there is to it.

Is your "eye job" perfect? Probably not. The eyes are typically a very small element in a photo, though, so even a quick job--like in my "after" shot--can dramatically improve a picture.

Dave's Favorites: Hitachi's 4GB Camera Memory

Do you ever think your camera doesn't have enough memory to keep up with your vacation schedule? Would 4 gigabytes of storage on a single card help solve that problem? Hitachi has announced just that: a variation of the IBM Microdrive with as much storage space as my PC's hard disk had in 1997. (Hitachi is in the process of acquiring all of IBM's hard drive manufacturing and sales.)

Microdrives are miniature hard disks that fit in a typical CompactFlash memory card slot. Currently, IBM sells 340MB and 1GB versions. Unfortunately, the new Microdrive won't be available until the fall, so I haven't had a chance to play with one of these myself yet... but I can hardly wait!

According to a Hitachi spokesperson, the new drive features a read-write head that is half the size of the one in IBM's 1GB Microdrive. The tolerances for this gadget are almost unbelievably small. When you consider the scale of the components--the read/write head is about the size of a grain of salt--it's analogous to a Boeing 747 airplane flying 1 millimeter above the surface of the earth.

The 4GB Microdrive will be CompactFlash Type II-compliant, which means that most digital cameras with CompactFlash slots should be able to use this new drive. How many pictures can you store on one of them? Think of it this way: You could set your 6-megapixel camera to TIFF mode--so it stores images without the losses induced by JPEG--and take more than 300 images without changing cards or downloading your pictures. In JPEG mode, you could probably go on a round-the-world vacation with just one card.

You can be sure I'll be waiting for Hitachi's Microdrive with bated breath. Unfortunately, I suspect the price tag--as yet unannounced--may keep anyone without deep pockets away for quite some time to come.

Q&A: My Prints Are Too Sharp!

I just had a photo service print a batch of digital images for me. When I look at the glossy prints, they seem almost too sharp. The faces are more than crystal clear, not like I would expect from a regular high-quality film camera. In fact, the prints are almost like some post cards I've seen that have been digitally enhanced. What are your thoughts?

--Larry Brooks, Miami, Florida

I have a theory, Larry. A lot of imaging professionals are in the habit of running a sharpening filter--usually Unsharp Mask--on scanned photos that are destined for print. The reason is that many scanners create a slightly soft image, so Unsharp Mask gives the images some bite. It's a particularly effective technique if the images are destined for print. So your photo shop might be running the sharpening filter on digital images as well, largely out of habit.

My suggestion? Talk to the folks at the store and ask them if they're sharpening images before printing. If they are, tell them that you'd rather have your prints without any such enhancements.

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: "Splish Splash," by Kevin McDonald, Gainesville, Florida

I'll admit that I'm a sucker for this sort of photography, and Kevin has pulled it off exceptionally well.

Here's what Kevin says about the photo: "I took this with a Canon S30 digital camera focused as closely as possible. I dyed some water blue and made a thin layer of it in the bottom of a kitchen trash can. I then released a blue water drop into that pool of water. I took the photo in total darkness and rigged an infrared beam to trigger the camera when the drop fell. The flash fires very briefly, momentarily freezing the action. I chose the angle of the shot to capture both the drop and the black background, creating a nice, outer-space-like feeling. I've always wanted to try this kind of a shot, but only recently managed to get hold of a flash and build the trigger circuit necessary."

Hot Pic of the Month

Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For January, we chose Eric Cheng's "Caribbean Reef Shark"--an action-packed, nearly 3D photo that should warm you up in the middle of this chilly winter season.

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.

For back issues, visit our Digital Photo Tips archive. Sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.