I was recently staying at the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. One evening I noticed a Bandicoot digging in the mulch down in the yard. It was a too far away for decent photo, and my flash didn’t have the oomph to light it properly, but had a crack at it anyway. By shining a torch on the animal I could get just enough light for the autofocus to lock in after it thrashed around for a while.

White eyes

The shots were very muddy and under exposed, and the flash reflection from the eyes has completely blown out the eye. Here is one of the “before” shots taken with Pentax K100D camera, Samsung Schneider SA 50-200mm zoom lens with Pentax AF200T external flash on full power.

BEFORE: Devil beast with scary white eyes

To salvage I played around with the levels and used Paint Shop Pro 8 to reconstruct the eye. I find the red eye adjustment in Paint Shop Pro easier to use than Photoshop, when the whole eye need to be restored. Here is the after shot - still not great but it makes a passable web shot for posting on the OzWildlife site.

AFTER: passable web shot - you can just about make out the beetle grub it is eating

Here is a screen shot of the red eye adjustment feature in Paint Shop Pro.

I find the most flexible approach to fix up the eye is to set the method to “Freehand Pupil Outline” and pick the Color thumbnail that best suits the eye color and pattern of the animal. This works even when the animal is at an angle and eye appears oval or semi-circle shape.

If the eye you need to fix is round, I sometimes use the following options

• method = Auto Human Eye
• hue=grey
• color=charcoal (the darkest thumbnail)
• iris size=0

Regardless of which option used, adjust the feather, blur and glint options to get a more natural look.

I’m using an out of date version of Paint Shop Pro - maybe the later versions have even better controls.

If you have ideas for how to improve these kind of shots, any suggestions are welcome. Two suggestions for improving that come to mind are a longer lens and a more powerful flash

Tags: flash, marsupials, nocturnal, red eye

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Mammals, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.