Even the most careful of photographers occasionally end up with problems in photos that must be fixed in order to produce pleasing finished pictures. Two of the most common problems are red-eye glare, and problems with brightness (either overexposure or underexposure). If you take digital photos, you can correct these problems using digital software before you even get your prints. In this section, I'll show you how to fix these problems using my software of choice, Paint Shop Pro (version 8). If you use a different software package, just check the help files for "red eye" and "brightness" for specific directions on correcting these problems in digital prints using your software.
Red-eye glare is caused by the reflection of your camera's flash on the retinas of the eye, making the eyes look red. It is a particular
problem when photographing pets, though in their case you get blue, yellow, or green reflections. You can buy red-eye removal pens to use on your prints, but you have more control over
the removal when you tackle it digitally.
1. Open the photo in Paint Shop Pro.
2. Click Adjust>Red-eye Removal. The Red-eye Removal dialog box opens.
3. Be sure the Method drop-down box is set appropriately (Auto Human Eye, in this case).
4. Click on one of the eyes in the left preview box. You'll see any changes you make reflected on the right box as you make them. Paint Shop Pro will make a default correction based
on the selections you have for pupil lightness, glint lightness, etc. but you will probably need to tweak it to make the correction look more realistic.
5. You can move or resize the location for the eye you will correct.
6. Select the eye color from the Hue drop-down box. In the color box, you can select the exact shade of whatever eye color you are trying to implement.
7. Now you'll just need to "play" with the other settings. You can make the glint in the eye (the white dot) smaller, larger, darker, brighter, or nonexistent. You can change the lightness
or darkness of the pupil, and control the feather (crispness of the edge of the correction) and the blur (crispness of the interior of the correction. Try different settings until the
correction is as realistic as possible.
8. Click on the other eye to repeat the corrections. Make any adjustments necessary.
9. Click OK.
That's all there is to it! Now you have a beautifully touched-up image with no "zombie eyes."
There are times when you can't control the lighting conditions when you're shooting an event, so in those cases you just have to make do with the photos you get. Sometimes there might not be enough light and there can be ugly shadows on your subjects. On the flip side, outdoor events often end up overexposed with too much sunlight. While you can't completely compensate for really bad lighting, you can make some improvement to your pictures in Paint Shop Pro.
Often, Paint Shop Pro's fantastic "One Step Photo Fix" will do the trick. In this photo of my youngest daughter, there just wasn't enough lighting and she was lost in shadows. All I had to do was click Enhance Photo>One Step Photo Fix on the Photo Toolbar, and voila! Darkness removed.
You might not like some of the changes Paint Shop Pro makes with its One Step Photo Fix. In that case, you can undo the "One Step" changes and manually adjust the brightness. The lights at a pet store are super-bright, which explains the overexposure of this photo of a couple of birds. The yellow bird, in particular, is just glaringly bright.
To manually adjust brightness, follow these directions:
1. Open the picture in Paint Shop Pro. Click Adjust>Brightness and Contrast>Brightness/Contrast. This opens the Brightness/Contrast dialog box.
2. Change the number in the Brightness dialog box. You can either type the numbers in, or use the slider. The image on the left is your original; the one on the right is the preview of
what the image would look like with your proposed changes. A positive number in the Brightness field will make the image brighter; a negative number will make it darker. I set my brightness
level as shown.
3. Click OK.
Following these directions, I achieved the following results. Easy as pie!
Do you have photos that need a little touching up? Use the instructions provided in this lesson to remove red-eye from any photos you might have, and to adjust brightness on any overexposed or underexposed pictures.
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