Free, Effective, Red-Eye Removal Tool

I've spent the last day or so looking for an effective, easy-to-use, free red-eye removal tool. After trying about four or five different programs, some large and some small, I found three different categories:

1) Plugins or red-eye removal utilities built inside much larger programs, like GIMP or Photoshop.

2) Stand-alone utilities that made the eye too dark.

3) Stand-alone utilities that did not remove all the red/screwed up other parts of the face.

Number One is no good because I really don't need/want a huge, complicated program. Number Two, for almost every single one I tried, did not work properly; the same result happened with Number Three. The automatic programs which offered to find the eye and remove the red often destroyed/altered the red in other parts, such as painted fingernails, and the eye would sometimes be ignored completely.

I finally settled on this program late last night. It is called Red Eye Remover Pro. Here are my personal pros and cons:

Pros:

-free
-allows you to select just the eye
-has a really nice UI; you can left-click to apply the red-eye removal/reduction and right-click to undo (I am using version 2.0, which, oddly enough, seems to be older than 1.2, which did not work on my computer)
-does not make the whole eye an un-natural jet black, preserving the flash in the center
-does not seem to alter the surrounding skin
-offers a little sliding bar to tweak the setting; the default seems to work perfectly for me

Cons:

-perhaps not the last word on red-eye removal; manual methods do seem to work a hair better. However, I lack the desire to learn a complicated new procedure, when this program works so well!

Hope this helps somebody who takes pictures of people and not just beamshots; I cleaned up five pictures last night at two minutes a pop.

Download/Info Page:

http://www.vicman.net/redeyeremoverpro/index.htm

Did you try Irfanview? I find it a useful program for basic red eye, cropping, creating panorama images, and saving in alternate formats. It's small, fast, easy, and free.

No, I have not tried Irfanview. I'll definitely give it a shot. I'm more one of those "one tool for the job at hand" kind of guys, which is, I believe, the reason I like the program I posted about so much. The last time I tried Irfanview was years ago. I'm mostly a point-and-shoot guy, which is why I wanted something that did one task well. Of course, that does not mean there aren't other tools to the do the job. Just personal preference, I suppose.

Hi - thanks for the links.

Pictures of my daughter are particularly prone to red- eye, so I try to use the easiest method - minimize red-eye in the first place.

IIRC, red-eye is primarily caused by the flash bouncing off of the back of the eye. The traditional methods of avoiding it are:
- Don't use a flash
- Highly diffuse the flash
- Move the flash at least 6 inches, ideally more, away from the camera lens.

My simplistic experience with digital cameras is that they seem to be somehow more likely to have this effect than film cameras - maybe that is just my imagination. In any event, it is one of the many reasons I have gone back to using film and home scannning.

It just amazes me that even pro sumer cameras costing $1000 or more come with a flash on body virtually mounted against the lens. It is almost as if they somehow forgot the basics of photography while creating these wiz bang electronic master pieces.

Regardless of brand or digital vs film, you can ditch the flash more often if you get a lens with a wide aperture. Minox cameras are particularly well known for this lens feature, and man do they take nice pics.

There are two primary preventative tricks:

1) Use the anti-redeye function on your camera. This sets off a series of flashes prior to taking the picture. How this works is the series of flashes causes the subject's eye pupils to contract in reaction to the bright light, so when the picture and primary flash is taken less light reflects off the rear of the eye.

2) Tell the subject to look about 3 feet to the side of the camera, not directly into the camera. This reduces the effects of red eye, and the effect of not directly at the camera is not noticeable in the pictures.

Makes sense. Just like in medicine, here are the two methods:

1) Prevention before the fact
2) Cleanup afterwards

Now, we have both bases covered.

HarryN, let us know how the utility works for you.

Just use Visine. It gets the red out.

I like Google's Picasa. It's free, has a good red eye removal tool, and if you have a gmail account they give you 1GB of free webspace to upload your photos. I find it a very easy way to keep track of my photos and it lets me quickly email them, export different sizes, upload them to my web album, etc. They are regularly updating it as well.

Also anytime you use a camera with a flash that is located near the lens you will likely get red eye, especially in lower light situations. I find the red-eye reduction modes on the cameras a waste of time. It's a waste of battery power, and it will delay the shutter from firing so you might miss a shot. You can usually effectively remove the red-eye with good software after the fact. The only way to really avoid red-eye at the time of taking the picture is to move the flash away from the lens of the camera, which for most people isn't possible or isn't something they'd want to deal with. This is why wedding photographers run around with their flash on a large bracket that gets it away from the lens and prevents red-eye.