Reducing Red Eye

Red eye occurs when the camera's flash bouces off the subject's pupils retina in the eye and is captured by the camera. The trick to reducing red eye involves reducing the size of the pupils. Here are some tips on reducing that pesky red eye:

1. For those photographers with external flashes, try to put distance between the camera's lens and flash. Hold the flash at arm's length or point the flash toward a white surface, such as a wall, so the flash does not flood the subject's eyes. This "bounce flash" softens the light from the flash.

2. If the flash is immobile, reduce the size of the subject's pupils by turning on bright lights or by shining a bright light briefly in the person's eyes prior to taking the picture.

3. Use the red-eye reduction feature available on many cameras. This feature reduces the subject's pupils with a series of low-level flashes prior to taking the picture. Make sure the subjects are aware which flash will take the picture.

4. Put tissue paper or a white filter over the flash to diffuse its brightness. The tissue paper shouldn't come into direct contact with the hot flashbulb. Some camera shops sell flash diffusers which accomplish the same task.

5. If the image is in digital format, most image editing software such as Photoshop® have excellent red eye reduction tools.

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Setting Your Camera's Resolution

The camera resolution to use depends on what you want to do with the picture. Do you want to e-mail it to friends, post it on a Web site, make it your computer's wallpaper, print it as a 4" x 6" photograph, or create a poster-sized print? For images that will be viewed on a computer monitor (such as those you send by e-mail or post to the Web), a low pixel-count setting is perfectly adequate. Since most people view images on monitors that display only 800 x 600 pixels, a low pixel-count image, such as a 600 x 400 photograph, will fill up most of their screen without running off the edges. A low pixel-count setting will also reduce the file size of the image and reduce time it takes others to download or display your image.

Printers, however, can print at much higher resolution than a typical computer screen. Images that you intend to print should be captured at a higher pixel-count setting.

• For a 2" x 3" print, the image dimensions should be 400 x 600 pixels minimum
• For a 4" x 6" print, the image dimensions should be 800 x 600 pixels minimum
• For a 5" x 7" print, the image dimensions should be 1000 x 1400 pixels minimum
• For an 8" x 10" print, the image dimensions should be 1600 x 2000 pixels minimum

If you don't know what you want to do with your image the moment you take a picture, to be safe, it's a good idea to set your camera to the highest resolution setting. You can always reduce the pixel-count of your image later for e-mailing or web publishing.

When you create graphics for the screen, embedded resolution does not matter. Simply pick the pixel dimensions of your image and don't worry about embedded resolution. Most people use 72 ppi for creating web graphics but this is just an arbitrary embedded resolution that has become a standard. You don't need to use 72 ppi to create a web graphic. Since monitors display images based on pixel dimension, embedded image resolution will not affect how large or small an image looks on the screen. A 300 by 199 pixel image set to 72 ppi and a 300 by 199 pixel image set to 300 ppi will look the same on the same screen. As discussed above, the embedded resolution (ppi or dpi) of an image only affects the image when printed.


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