photographing rabbits with red eyes

[Pet_Bunny]

Looking at the comparisons, mine is quite warm (if you like the reddish colour), so I tried again using the black eye dropper and the white eye dropper. This is what I got.

So you can see with digital photography, three people can have different results.

 

[TinysMom]

Amazing.

I wish I could have you two at the end of my camera taking my pictures for me....

 

[MikeScone]

Pet_Bunny wrote:

So you can see with digital photography, three people can have different results.

That is a big part of the fascination of photography - there's no "right" way. All of the pictures are "right", in their own way.

There really is a difference in seeing, which goes beyond just taste. Like 15-20% of the male population, my vision is color deficient ("red-green color blind"), so I have trouble determining just what a color shift is - but I can usually tell when it doesn't look right. My corrections do tend to be on the cooler side, since I can see the blue shift better than a redder one.

 

[myheart]

I wish I had my camera here to play with the settings now...

I was taking pics of my gp's this weekend. One pig has pink eyes and his brother has brown. I could fix the glare on the brown eyes with the red-eye fix, but the pink eyes came out 'dead' looking or didn't change at all. I was so disappointed with he amount of flash andcouldn't figure out how to turn it off. NowI know I need to 'turn the flash amount down.'

I do hope this works for blue-eyed bunnies as well like Donna says. I get so much flash glare off of their eyes also, that I don't really have any nice pics that are 'framing' quality.

I will most certainly play with mycamera settings in the next few days!! Thanks Stan and Mike for all of your help!

 

[bunnychild]

I don't use flash I usually have a bright light behind me.

 

[piperknitsRN]

I'm having the same red-eye glare problem with Simon, my REW New Zealand (or mix, as he doesn't seem to be getting that big). I was shooting in some pretty crappy lighting conditions (incandescent or fluorescent, not sure which--just your standard old lightbulb, in any case) at night, but I tried setting the aperture to the highest it would go (3.8 or 3.5 I think is the highest on my Nikon D3100) and that plus some other minor tweaks got rid of the glare, I ended up with some funky, off-kilter colors in the background. I don't have an external flash (yet) and it'll probably be some time before I can get one, though they're not particularly expensive (the one I'm looking at, any way) and that might help, but I'd still like some help with this issue. Simon's eyes are, after all, a pinkish red, and photoshopping them just makes them look dead and black or grey, depending on what program I was using (which I've done in several pictures where the flare was really bad).

 

[MikeScone]

piperknitsRN wrote:

I was shooting in some pretty crappy lighting conditions (incandescent or fluorescent, not sure which--just your standard old lightbulb, in any case) at night, but I tried setting the aperture to the highest it would go (3.8 or 3.5 I think is the highest on my Nikon D3100) and that plus some other minor tweaks got rid of the glare, I ended up with some funky, off-kilter colors in the background. Simon's eyes are, after all, a pinkish red, and photoshopping them just makes them look dead and black or grey, depending on what program I was using (which I've done in several pictures where the flare was really bad).

The old-fashioned light bulb was tungsten (incandescent), so if that's what you've got the background colors would be orangy. If you have one of the newer compact flourescent bulbs the colors could be bluish or greenish. We have a thread on white balance which might be useful in understanding the effects.

Actually, if you're concerned about blasted-out flash pictures, you're going in the wrong direction - you want the f-stop to be smaller (i.e. higher number), not larger (smaller number). If you're using flash at f3.5, that lets in the maximum amount of light The D3100's going to try to use the flash as much for fill as possible, which means that the ambient light will have the maximum effect. That's why you can get a weird mix of colors in the light. If you stop the lens down to f8 or f11 the background will be darker and less off-color as the flash does more of the work.

As to Simon's eyes, if they are naturally pink you don't really want to make them dark brown or black - that would look OK for Natasha, whose eyes are dark brown, but not for Simon. So, the redeye tool might actually be counterproductive.

What you can try is to use the circular lasso or quick select command to select his eye - use the Select|Refine edge... command to feather the edge to avoid harsh lines. Then use "Image|Adjust lighting|levels" (hit ctrl-L for a shortcut) or "Enhance|Adjust Color|adjust color curves" to darken the eye, but not to change the colors.

If you want to post a picture, I can take a shot at it and tell you what I did.

 

[piperknitsRN]

Mike:

This is an absolutley lousy picture of Simon, but it does show you the issue with red eye. I think I'm going to bring the camera back, as it's not holding a charge properly. It seems to go down to one bar of battery life within an hour, and I can use it for about 300 or so pics from then on, but it's disconcerting to never know when the battery is going to run out.

But, any tips on getting the "glow" out of his eyes would be appreciated.

You have been so very helpful! I can't thank you enough!

Thanks!

 

[piperknitsRN]

MikeScone wrote:

piperknitsRN wrote:

I was shooting in some pretty crappy lighting conditions (incandescent or fluorescent, not sure which--just your standard old lightbulb, in any case) at night, but I tried setting the aperture to the highest it would go (3.8 or 3.5 I think is the highest on my Nikon D3100) and that plus some other minor tweaks got rid of the glare, I ended up with some funky, off-kilter colors in the background. Simon's eyes are, after all, a pinkish red, and photoshopping them just makes them look dead and black or grey, depending on what program I was using (which I've done in several pictures where the flare was really bad).

The old-fashioned light bulb was tungsten (incandescent), so if that's what you've got the background colors would be orangy. If you have one of the newer compact flourescent bulbs the colors could be bluish or greenish. We have a thread on white balance which might be useful in understanding the effects.

Actually, if you're concerned about blasted-out flash pictures, you're going in the wrong direction - you want the f-stop to be smaller (i.e. higher number), not larger (smaller number). If you're using flash at f3.5, that lets in the maximum amount of light The D3100's going to try to use the flash as much for fill as possible, which means that the ambient light will have the maximum effect. That's why you can get a weird mix of colors in the light. If you stop the lens down to f8 or f11 the background will be darker and less off-color as the flash does more of the work.

As to Simon's eyes, if they are naturally pink you don't really want to make them dark brown or black - that would look OK for Natasha, whose eyes are dark brown, but not for Simon. So, the redeye tool might actually be counterproductive.

What you can try is to use the circular lasso or quick select command to select his eye - use the Select|Refine edge... command to feather the edge to avoid harsh lines. Then use "Image|Adjust lighting|levels" (hit ctrl-L for a shortcut) or "Enhance|Adjust Color|adjust color curves" to darken the eye, but not to change the colors.

If you want to post a picture, I can take a shot at it and tell you what I did.

Mike:

This is a much better picture with Simon's eyes "glowing":

 

[Pet_Bunny]

Mike is right about Simon's eyes, that they are naturally pink/red for his breed. I would leave them as they are.
For the brightness of the flash, the higher models (the flash) allow you to dial down the strength of light on the subject.
You could also do that on the Nikon D3100. The active flash button on the front left, is a good design for this type of camera. Hold the button and spin the control dial and you can switch flash modes, hold it and the exposure compensation button as well and you can apply flash exposure compensation.

I like to use a wider aperture (f3.5) for my flash to keep my backgrounds bright. If I use f8.0, my pictures would have a bright subject but the background would be very dark or black.

 

[MikeScone]

Pet_Bunny wrote:

I like to use a wider aperture (f3.5) for my flash to keep my backgrounds bright. If I use f8.0, my pictures would have a bright subject but the background would be very dark or black.

That's something to experiment with - sometimes the darker background looks good, especially with a light-colored bunny for contrast. If the color balance of the background is weird, it's better to have a darker background than one with an unusual color cast.

I've thought of something else to check - try turning the Auto ISO feature off if you're using flash. With my D300, the camera used the set ISO if I used flash, so the flash/background balance was controlled well by the f-stop. The D7000, for some reason, was programmed so that if you had Auto ISO on, it would run the ISO all the way up as if the flash weren't there. As a result, the flash pictures tended to look washed out, because they were all shot under low light (why else would I use flash?) and the camera set the ISO way too high. I now turn off Auto ISO when I'm using flash.

I think your D3100 is doing the same - the EXIF information says the ISO was set at 3200. Try setting it to a manual 200 and see if you like the results better. Also, make sure the exposure mode is either A (if you want to set the aperture value) or P - I think you were in manual exposure mode.

I did play around a bit with the picture in Photoshop Elements 8, and I think it looks more natural this way. What I did was use the "burn" tool (looks like a little hand giving the "OK" sign), set to "highlights", 60% exposure, and a blurry 13px tool size. I then burned in the pupil of the eye, holding the tool a bit more in the center than the edges.

 

[piperknitsRN]

MikeScone wrote:

Pet_Bunny wrote:

I like to use a wider aperture (f3.5) for my flash to keep my backgrounds bright. If I use f8.0, my pictures would have a bright subject but the background would be very dark or black.

That's something to experiment with - sometimes the darker background looks good, especially with a light-colored bunny for contrast. If the color balance of the background is weird, it's better to have a darker background than one with an unusual color cast.

I've thought of something else to check - try turning the Auto ISO feature off if you're using flash. With my D300, the camera used the set ISO if I used flash, so the flash/background balance was controlled well by the f-stop. The D7000, for some reason, was programmed so that if you had Auto ISO on, it would run the ISO all the way up as if the flash weren't there. As a result, the flash pictures tended to look washed out, because they were all shot under low light (why else would I use flash?) and the camera set the ISO way too high. I now turn off Auto ISO when I'm using flash.

I think your D3100 is doing the same - the EXIF information says the ISO was set at 3200. Try setting it to a manual 200 and see if you like the results better. Also, make sure the exposure mode is either A (if you want to set the aperture value) or P - I think you were in manual exposure mode.

I did play around a bit with the picture in Photoshop Elements 8, and I think it looks more natural this way. What I did was use the "burn" tool (looks like a little hand giving the "OK" sign), set to "highlights", 60% exposure, and a blurry 13px tool size. I then burned in the pupil of the eye, holding the tool a bit more in the center than the edges.

Thanks again for the tips and tricks, Mike. I will try them out when my camera's batteries recharge (I took my camera back and got a new one; think there was something goofy about the first set of batteries I had).

 

[Pet_Bunny]

This is what I came up with using Capture NX2. The red eye reduction program looked terrible (the eyes were all black).
So I darken the whole image alittle from the histogram. Then I simply used the my color control point (a feature on Capture NX2) to reduce brightness, contrast, saturation, and some of the red values.

 

[piperknitsRN]

Pet_Bunny wrote:

This is what I came up with using Capture NX2. The red eye reduction program looked terrible (the eyes were all black).
So I darken the whole image alittle from the histogram. Then I simply used the my color control point (a feature on Capture NX2) to reduce brightness, contrast, saturation, and some of the red values.

I tried the red eye reduction on Simon, too... doesn't work well for REW's! Thank you for this nice rendering!

 

[bunnychild]

i can't ever find a good FREE picture editting cite

 

[OneTwoThree]

Piper, your off camera flash will help a ton with the red eye issue

 

[piperknitsRN]

OneTwoThree wrote:

Piper, your off camera flash will help a ton with the red eye issue

That's great! I can't wait to get that and my other lenses. I'm having fun, even though I barely know what I'm doing .

 

[OneTwoThree]

piperknitsRN wrote:

OneTwoThree wrote:

Piper, your off camera flash will help a ton with the red eye issue

That's great! I can't wait to get that and my other lenses. I'm having fun, even though I barely know what I'm doing .

I'm excited for you I live and breath photography haha, so I'll be lurking to help you out if you need it

 

[piperknitsRN]

OneTwoThree wrote:

piperknitsRN wrote:

OneTwoThree wrote:

Piper, your off camera flash will help a ton with the red eye issue

That's great! I can't wait to get that and my other lenses. I'm having fun, even though I barely know what I'm doing .

I'm excited for you I live and breath photography haha, so I'll be lurking to help you out if you need it

My lens shipped today. Dummy me, I forgot to order it as "free one day shipping" as they had it on special, but I didn't notice until after I placed the order. Detail, details... :baghead.