Glowing eyes in cat pictures: how to avoid?
I have 2 blue-eyed ragdoll cats and when I take their pictures, they end up looking like they have glowing devil eyes. My camera (Nikon Coolpix 950) has one flash; no way to add another or re-aim it. Red-eye fixes in Photoshop/etc. don't do much but change red glow to yellow. Suggestions?
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1. they're possessed by demons2. If the camera doesn't have a red eye correction setting, bring more light into the room (natural or artificial) so the flash has to do less work, or bring in so much light that the flash isn't needed at all.
3. When taking the photo, take it in a well lit area, so that flash is not necessary. The more even the light the better.
If you must use flash (I'm prejudiced it for exactly your problem), your camera may have an anti-red eye mode!
iPhoto has red eye removal that works pretty well, but if you need a more refined tool, use Photoshop. I would manually zoom up and paint over the red with a natural color (hopefully the cat's natural eye color), which, when you zoom out and look at the whole photo, you won't be able to tell the difference!
Also, visit this tutorial:)
http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/ht/apsredeye.htm
Hope I helped!
4. Check out this About.com tutorial for removing pet eye. The easy directions have worked wonders for my pet photos!
5. My best advice would be to avoid the use of the flash as much as possible. Try shooting with the ambient (available) light. It’ll be the end of the red-eyed monsters and give a much more natural feel to photos. The built-in flash is a very focused, harsh light which generally doesn’t provide a very flattering form of lighting.
To get indoor shots without the flash, allow as much natural light in as possible or try to take shots of the cats when they’re in well lit areas. Turn on room lights if it’ll help but a side-effect from a combination of daylight and room light is some strange and largely uncorrectable colour casts.
You could experiment with diffusing (softening) the light from the flash by placing some tissue or opaque plastic over the flash, taking care to keep it clear of the lens or any sensors. This is highly experimental and make take a bit of practice but you could end up with something you quite like! Or it could be a total disaster! I won’t cost anything to find out though.
If you can alter the ISO setting on that model of the Coolpix, using a higher setting (400 -1600) may allow you to shoot without having to use the flash. The downside to doing this is the pictures may look a bit grainy, like what you get from using a high speed film in a film camera. Look for a control on the camera to force the camera to shoot without the flash. It looks like a lightening bolt in a circle with a diagonal line running through it. Again, I don’t know if this is a feature on this particular model or not.
Hopefully I’m pointing you in the right direction and you get some successful shots. One other thing I nearly forgot about. When your cats are in brighter lighting conditions, the part of their eyes that turns colour from the flash closes up and the effect is minimized to a great extent, so if the flash goes off, the result will be considerably less devilish.
6. Use a white Kleenex tissue over the flash to diffuse it. It will soften the flash and should reduce the flash's reflection. You may have to play around with the manual exposure settings a bit, because the flash won't be as bright as the camera is expecting, so you could be a bit underexposed unless you slow down the shutter speed or open up the aperture a bit more. You could also try increasing the ambient light in the room, turn off the flash, increase the ISO setting and slow down the shutter speed a bit so you don't underexpose. Also, try to take the photo a little off to the side so the flash isn't hitting straight in to their eyes.
7. There are a few things you can do, both while taking the photo and editing it. When taking the photo, try not to use the flash as much as possible- turn on as many lights as possible, take photos during the day, etc. I always take photos of my kitties with the camera on the "high speed" setting (since they move around), trying not to use the flash at all. Then when editing, if you use the shutterfly editing software, they have a special setting/fix specifically to address pet glowing eyes, that is separate from human red eye fixes.
