How to prevent Red Eyes in Photos

Red Eye is an unwanted phenomenon in photography that occurs when we take photos in low light using a flash. In simple words it’s just the reflection of light from our eyes because of the intense light falling on to it. Now, the question will be how to avoid these uninteresting red eyes from photos. The immediate answer that comes to our mind would be to fix it using some image-processing tool like Photoshop. Let us see, how to avoid this while taking the picture itself so that we don’t have to work twice.

Most of the cameras today come with Red eye reduction as a feature. You just have to enable it in the camera settings by looking at the camera manual. You can use this if you are going to take the picture of someone with the aid of a flash. 

What if the camera does not come with this feature? Then it will be little tricky.  Now, it depends on the skill of the photographer to avoid the red eye. Since it’s basically the light reflecting back to the camera lens, the best option would be to make the subject/person to look at some other side rather than looking directly into the camera. Here, you are positioning the camera away from the eye of the person, so larger the angle away from the camera, lesser the chance of red eye formation in the image.

Another option will be to use the highest possible focal length available in your camera. In another words, make use of the maximum optical zoom possible in your camera to capture the image. This may work because the intensity of the red eye is directly proportional to the amount of light reflected from the eye. So, farther the distance lesser will be the intensity and hence the red eye effect will not be visible. One thing to be checked over here is that the flash you are going to use is well within the focal length range or the distance you have moved away from the person. If any of these does not work, then you can go for the post processing option as the last resort,