What is the trick to taking photos with a flash and avoiding red eye?

Question

I continue to have problems with red eye in pictures where I have to use the flash. What is the trick to avoiding red eye?

Answer 1

You get red eye because the light source is too close to the optical path. The light from the flash is reflecting off the back of the eye!
Picture a line between your subject's eye and your camera lens. Now picture a line between your subject's eye and your flash. Because the lines are so close, the light travels to the back of the eye, and reflects back red because of all the blood vessels in the eye, and shows up on the image.
Pros use flashes that are very high off the camera, or maybe even totally off the camera, several feet away. This means the light path of the light doesn't reflect back to the lens, the red reflection still occurs but doesn't get captured by the camera.
So I'm going to assume you use a point a shoot camera, which this is much more of a problem than pro cameras. If you have an advanced model with a hot shoe, you can add an external flash on, which will eliminate or drastically reduce this. You'll also have much better pictures!
If you don't have a hot shoe, you are sort of stuck. If you're doing artsy photos, try having the subject look away, this makes for good images anyway.

Answer 2

Red eye is caused by the flash bouncing off the back of the retina of the eye. So you have to try some things to keep this from happening. If you are shooting with a camera with an attached flash and can't simply adjust the flash to bounce off another source, you can try some of these tricks.

Make sure there's lots of light in the room. This will shrink the size of the pupil. Some cameras have red-eye reduction modes or other modes that will shoot off a few flashes of light before the actual photo is taken. These modes also serve to shrink the size of the pupil and reduce the amount of the light that gets into the eye and bounces back.

Have your subjects not look directly at the camera, but just to the side of it. The angle might be just enough to keep the red from bouncing back.

Finally, you can try just taking a few steps back and then zooming in so that the flash isn't as strong when it hits your subjects.

Answer 3

Red eye is caused when the flash bounces around the inside of the eye and this light makes its way to the camera, so the worst case is when the eye is pointing right at the flash and the camera lens. Change the angles and you can avoid red eye entirely. (For those who always use flash, turn off the flash when you don't need it and you not only avoid red eye, but you get more three-dimensional scenes.)

You can also take out red eye after you take a photo and that is what the professional photographers I know mostly do. Photo editing tools have features specifically for red eye removal.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

Really all you have to do is to ask your subject, if your subject knows you are photographing him, to turn his head ever so slightly. It all works on the angle of incidence, that is the angle that the flash hits the subject, equalling the angle of reflectance, that is the angle that the light leaves the subject. If the subjects eyes are on the same axis as the flash, you will get red eye. Envision this: \|/ where the bottom of the straight line is the subject, by photographing the subject at an angle rather than directly on, your flash will not bounce back off of the back of the eye.

As for the concept of "post processing," that is ridiculous - if you take the picture right in the first place, you don't have to screw around with it on the computer.

Answer 6

Short answer, you can either bounce your flash off the ceiling, or a reflector, correct in photoshop, or use red eye reduction mode on your flash [flash emits a series of short flash pulses to allow the iris to contract before the main flash].

Answer 7

Actually, stepping back and zooming in will probably cause more red eye, due to the angles involved.

This is why wedding photographers mount their flash high above the lens. (Well, that and shadow control)

Best method is fix in post processing.

Answer 8

red eye reduction can help with this. what the red is is a reflection of the inside of your eye. you can HELP alleviate this by looking just to the bottom of the camera.

Answer 9

set it on red eye reduction