 BetterPhoto Member |
Eye Glare with a Digital Camera I just purchased a Kodak Easyshare C330 digital camera. This is my first digital camera. I am having a problem with "eye glare" in the pictures that I am taking. The problem is not "red eye", but there is a glare in the eye due to reflection from the flash. Kodak is telling me this is normal. It does not sound normal to me. Please help.
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- Bob Cournoyer Contact Bob Cournoyer Bob Cournoyer's Gallery  |
HI, is it just a small dot of light? Kind of like a twinkle in the eye? If so, that's generally a good thing. That's a "catch-light" that people pay big bucks for...:-) If not, just ask people to look at your hand on either side of the camera, so the flash doesn't get in their eyes. Bob
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Michael C. Bennett |
Hi there, Bob C's response is right on. The only other solution is to modify the light coming from the flash itself. If you constantly get too much reflection in people's eyes from flash built into the camera, move the flash. You can do this if you have a hot shoe on top of the camera, in which case your eyeball reflection of the flash will be reduced. You will need to shut off the built-in flash on the camera, or greatly reduce its output, if possible, when using external flash. The whole problem is that your flash is too close to the lens, and your lens is at 90 degrees to the reflective surface. Raise the lens and that 90 degrees gets reduced. Another possibility which requires NO equipment, is to get slightly lower than your subject and then get them to look over your shoulder. This again changes the angle from 90 degrees between reflective surface and camera lens/flash source. Hope this helps - Michael
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anonymous A. |
These solutions are right on for red-eye, but Howard says he knows red-eye and this ain't it! My guess is that there might be two problems conspiring to spoil the photos: the C330 has an optical viewfinder; getting the focus right on the eyes in low light conditions isn't easy and I'll bet that in these shots the face is central which puts the nose in the middle of the autofocus sensor. with low light and flash conspiring to give a narrow depth of field, the eyes will tend to be slightly out-of-focus and a bit glazed. Add to that the noise generated in these conditions as the camera pushes up the ISO rating to cope with the low light and you get this sort of result. If the camera is zoomed out to the telephoto end, you may also be outside the effectic=ve range of the inbuilt flash unit, adding to your woes. The solution is to make sure you are within range of the flash, lock focus on the eyes (half-depress the shutter release) then recompose without changing the pressure on the button before you press it all the way.
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anonymous A. |
I neglected to say how you can fix this after the event. Most red-eye correction just recolours the pupil black. That won't help here. Instead, you can open a second image in photoshop or a similar program and clone the eyes from one pic to the other. Tricky and needs quite a bit of patience, but I have used this to rescue photos quite effectively. The other option is to use the red-eye option in Paint Shop Pro, which lets you build a whole new eye very simply and realistically, catch lights and all! David.
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