Shooting outdoors using available light is fun, which gives good results with compact digital cameras. But have you ever tried shooting in poorly-lit rooms indoors, and using the flash to light the people? If you have, you might have noticed something strange happening with the subject's eyes, which appear glowing red on many snapshots. The 'demonic' look of your friends and relatives can make your photographs appear ruined. But wait! Don't trash your pictures just yet! You didn't go digital for no reason, and one of the benefits digital photography gives you as opposed to film is the ease of fixing minor issues like this. All is not lost, and this effect can be easily corrected if you have the right tools.
You might wonder why the red eyes, and what's the cause? This common effect is officially called red-eye, and is a well-known phenomenon in the world of photography. It happens because of the flash being too fast for someone's eye to close the pupil. The light emitted by the flash bounces off the back surface of the eye, and makes the subject's eyes appear to be glowing red on snapshots. The red-eye effect is especially pronounced in children and in people with grey or blue eyes.
Professional photographers fight red-eye by using dedicated, big and heavy flash units that bounce light off the ceilings or walls. With a compact digital camera that's simply not possible. After all, it does not make any sense to carry around a flash that is twice as big and heavy as your camera!
Modern cameras are equipped with red-eye reduction modes that fire the flash several times to allow pupils to close, but honestly this technology isn't even remotely effective on small snapshot-type cameras. You're generally much better off using dedicated software on your computer to correct pictures for the red-eye.
"Oh, no!" you might think. "Would I have to spend hours fixing dozens of snapshots? It's boring!"
You're absolutely right! We agree it's no fun fixing multiple shots. To save time and effort, we developed a unique product that fixes the red-eye in all of your digital pictures completely automatically, and requires absolutely no intervention on your part!
Stop spending hours in graphic editors! No need to open pictures one by one, and manually select and fix the eyes! No degrading your pictures quality by re-saving JPEGs! StopRedEye! will do the job for you automatically and in the best possible way. It'll only retouch those parts of the image that need correction and won't cause the quality loss that would inevitably happen should you open your picture in an editor and save it again in JPEG format.
To fix red eyes in your digital snapshots, simply select them and click "Start Correction" in StopRedEye! The program will handle the rest - automatically. It'll take a bunch of photos you've just selected, automatically detect human faces, discover and check the eyes, and fix the eyes by giving them back their natural color. And did I mention that it all happens automatically? You can sit and watch, or make and have some coffee in the process - without affecting the result!
Every time you open and save a JPEG digital picture in an editor its quality is decreased. That's inevitable with regular image editing tools due to the nature of the JPEG compression algorithm. But why degrade the entire image quality if you need to fix just a tiny part of it? StopRedEye! employs a unique algorithm that makes the red-eye correction lossless. It extracts and retouches only the small parts of an image that contain the eyes, and does not affect the rest of the picture. Thanks to this unique feature, your image quality will not be negatively affected by StopRedEye!
Do you want some numbers? We analyzed StopRedEye! performance on a sample of 1200 different pictures, and are happy to share the results with you. StopRedEye! can find and correct red eyes in 98% of our tested samples. This means if you have a bunch of 100 digital pictures, you'll only have to deal with an average of two, and the rest will be processed automatically. In 0.1% (that's one in a thousand!) of pictures it can miss here and there. Each digital picture takes 5 to 7 seconds on a modern PC. If you have a hundred shots, you'll be done in less than 10 minutes!
StopRedEye! is available as a free evaluation download at: http://www.stopredeye.com/. Don't take our word for it, check out the StopRedEye! performance on your own pictures!
About the Author: Alexander Gerasimov is a CTO and co-founder of SciFusion Software, a small software development company specializing in research and intellectual photo processing. Alexander holds an MS in computer science and has a strong background in software application development.