Understanding Red Eye Effect and Reducing It

It is one of your important occasions, you make sure everything is set. The atmosphere is right, the ambience is perfect. And it seems like a perfect setting for a memorable photograph. You get yourself photographed. And when you see the result, your excitement dies away. You look like a ghost in the photograph with blood shot red eyes. Everything was so correct, where the heck did the red eye come from? And how to get rid of that going further? Let's try to find those answers.

Red eyes are mostly prevalent in the photographs that are taken in the night with a flash. The Red color comes from the light that gets reflected from our retinas. In night time, the surroundings are normally dark or dimly lit. And in these conditions, the flash of camera comes as a flood of light for the eyes. The light of the flash occurs so fast that the iris of the eye does not gets enough time to close the pupil. As a result, light is focused onto the retina situated at the back of the eye. Retina is blood rich, because of the blood vessels that nourish the eye. This blood rich retina comes as a Red image, and this is reflected back to the camera. And this results in the Red effect that can be seen in the eyes in the photographs. The more open your pupils are, the more Red effect you get in your photographs.

So, this answers our first question, Where did the Red eye come from. Now once we have understood what causes Red eye, let's try to seek out how to reduce this effect.

There are lot of ways to reduce the chance of Red eye in your photographs. You just need to keep a few things in mind. As we already discussed that flash of the camera plays a spoil sport, so you can try to take pictures without the flash. For that, you can try to increase the ambient light. In case you have to use the flash, try to position it an angle so that the flash light does not hits the eye directly. You can also achieve that effect by asking the subject not to look at the camera directly. Instead, they can try focusing on the shoulder of the cameraman. You can also try to increase the room light so that pupils are more constricted, and thus less Red eye. Modern cameras take care of the Red eye effect. They flash twice. The first flash constricts the pupil, so that light of second immediate flash does not hits the retina directly.

So, now we have answered both the questions that we started with. We understand what causes that strange looking Red eye effect. And we know how to reduce that. However, in case you still end up with some Red eye effect in your photograph, you can easily remove it using the various image editing software available around. My favorite one out there is Picasa. It provides a one click feature to remove Red eye.

Red eye effect can spoil the best of your pictures. But the good news is that it is really easy to eliminate them. Just follow the tips above, and you are all set to amazing photography.