Red Eye removal- How do you do it?

[jorgemonkey]

For a fathers day present to my Dad, I've got his 14 carosels (sp?) of slides from his kids growing up that I'm digitalizing with my D70, and a fair amount of the images have some red eye in them. Hopefully we'll get some good info on here and others can benefit from it as well

[drg]

The Red-Eye tools in basic image editing software works very well. Either zoom in on the eye so the tool/brush covers the area completely or size the brush (depends on software) to overlap the 'red' area. Then click and you are usually done.

You can also select a smaller brush and 'track' the red and retain more eye color in some cases. If one eye is red and the other isn't as bad, fix the better of the two. Then copy the eye and use it to replace the other one! Then both are the same color. Just copy the Iris portion. If the photo was taken at an angle to the person, you may want to flip the eye horizontally and rotate perhaps to make it 'fit'.

Duplicating slides with a camera (particularly a DSLR) has always been dependent on having a good light source to full illuminate the transparency. Carefully set your custom white balance, and reset it every 10-15 minutes. If you are using natural light you may have to change/set/adjust WB more often with clouds, time of day, sun movement and so forth.

Blow the dust off the slides with an air bulb prior to duplicating.

There may be some other color problems with older slides as they will often fade. You may need to do some other 'touch up' work that will require some picture improvement. I've mentioned a few pieces of software below in that "about $100" range. Usually less with rebates or at street prices.

For most users Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 will provide the best/easiet red-eye reduction and overall quick improvements to photos. Also there is a color replacement tool that lets you select the 'red' and replace it with a more natural eye color.

H-P is shipping a very complete program with their newer printers that seems to be a quite powerful application. I've only used it briefly after installing a printer for friend.

The Microsoft Picture tools seem to alter the color of some eyes in the wrong way (my limited experiece only) though the MS product works quite well.

With many photos, like all editing tasks, it can be time consuming but you'll get better with each completed job. There are some automated tricks in programs like CS2 but you have to build actions and they don't save much time in my opinion.

Nikon does have some newer software that deals with face recognition. There is not yet a lot of information widely available and it isn't inexpensive to implement. For this number of slides, I'd suggest just using the red-eye tools that are widely available.

[another view]

That sums it up pretty well!

Only thing I'll add is that you should put the camera on a tripod, use a moderate aperture like f8 and have the camera as close to the axis of the slide projector as you can.

[jorgemonkey]

Thanks for the tips!

I'll have to get a photo of my slide coping setup. I'll try to describe it though-

I've got the Nikon Bellows set that I got from my grandfather


and its set on a tripod with the slide copying attachment that I bought seperately. I've got a 50 1.8 lens that I'm using to copy them with. I've got my WB set good, and I have my SB-800 flash on a cord connected to the camera, and its set on a lightstand with an umbrella to help spread & soften the light. I've been shooting at anywhere between F4-F11, thought I try to keep it at F8.

Depending if the shot comes out to dark/light, I'll adjust the flash output or the F-stop, whichever I feel like grabbing. I've shot about 500 so far, and I've only got another 50-75 more to shoot, then I'm just doing a quick editing job to put them on the web. Then if people want a print or a full res copy, I'll do a better editing job on them.

I've got PS CS2 for editing, so software isn't a problem

I have found that when I bring the image into CS2, Auto levels or Auto color balance has been spot on almost all the time. After I do those, I'll do any other tweaking and then save it for the web. I'm at work now, but I'll post some examples of what I've gotten so far later today.

[jorgemonkey]

Well now that its my lunch break, I'll post a couple images that I've shot:

If the images are a little blurry, its because the original shooter didn't focus fast enough

These were all shot by either my Mom or my Dad with his Nikon FM and either a 50mm 1.8 AIS lens or a 70-300 AIS lens:

Here is me when I was 5-6 (I think, I'll have to check the date when it was shot later)


This is one of my favorite trains (We're a train family), it was shot on one of its runs past my house when they bring it out on occasion:


Another train, but I dont recognize what kind it is:


A lighthouse- I believe this is somewhere in Oregon since thats where my Dad was born:


I'm gonna try to take out some red eye later today and so I'll post some of those examples as well.

[freygr]

Forth photo is the Heccta Head Light house, just north of Florance, OR. The photo looks like it was taken from the sea lion caves or just north.