Red Eye, Issues and Answers.
There it is, even when you use red eye reduction, red eye. So, WHY!! Why can't you get rid of it?? Well, first let's explain what it is and when it happens. When your flash is too close to the lens on your camera (unless you have an external flash, this means your camera) and you take pictures in low light, or even not so low light, the flash passes into the eye and reflects off the fundus at the back of the eyeball and back out the pupil. The pupil can't dilate fast enough with a flash. That is why the darker the room, the more likely you will get red eye. The more light, the more the pupil is all ready dilated and thus the bounce of the flash off the fundus is minimized.
So solution number one. Get an external flash so you can bounce the light, diffuse the light, or increase the distance between the flash and the lens. For the rest of you --- Photoshop or other image editing software.
Fixing red eye with photo software can be as simple as clicking the "fix red eye button" in the program. And I find this to work quite well in Photoshop. I rarely have to manually fix red eye, but if you do here's how.
You need to replace the red in the eye with a bluish black overlay. So this is our before image. The first step is to save a new image so if you really mess up you can just delete the file and you still have the original.
If you have Photoshop or another image software that has layers, use a new layer to work on so you preserve the original.
Then Zoom in to work on it.
Now, get your brush and size it to just about the pupil size.
Select a navy blue or black color and adjust the brush properties to overlay. If you can't change the brush properties in your program, then just use black and a VERY soft brush. Brush over all the red.
The reason for using the overlay is it preserves any texture or shades of color that may be in the photo, like the white gleam!
It may be a bit too much, so save as a file or layer and try again until it looks right. Here is the fixed photo.
