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remove redeye

howto remove redeye from a photo

Red eyes in photos are a real pain. They can really ruin what might otherwise be a nice photo. This howto explains a method for removing redeye that's really straight forward - no fuss at all. It's a shame it can't be run as a batch process. The programme used to do this job is a photo management application called digikam.

Digikam is a very powerful photo management tool, which can download, organise, edit and export photos in all manner of different configurations. Digikam is mainstream enough that it should be packaged for your distribution. If not, you may find a package here. Otherwise, get the source from here, and compile it yourself.

digikam

Once you've got digikam installed, run it. It will run you through a wizard and ask you where your photos are. Unfortunately, in order to manage a photo in digikam, the photo has to be in an "album". An album is just a directory somewhere on the filesystem, so just point digikam to the folder(s) where you keep your images. Select the "Album" view from the tabs on the left hand side of the window, and then select the album you want to work on. This should open up the album and display all the photos in the album in the main window. Click on the image you want to fix, and it should open up in the digikam editor

removing redeye

Once in the digikam editor, select the region of the photo you want to fix. You can adjust the size of the picture by using the magnifying glass icons on the toolbar:

The magnifying glass on the right will fit the photo to the size of the window. This can be toggled on and off. If it's off, you can use the magnifying glasses on the left to resize the image. This is important, because you want to make the selected region as small as possible, while still including all the redness. A bigger image makes it easier to do this.

Once you've got the "redeye" selected, go up to the "Fix" entry in the menu, and click on Fix->Red Eye Reduction. A dialog box will pop up asking you to select the level of redeye removal; "Mild" or "Strong":

Once applied, the redeye should be mostly gone:

other redeye tools

There are other photo managers have redeye removal tools. There's picasa from google. This is essentially the windows version with a statically linked version of wine built into the application so it'll run on linux. I haven't tried this, but I imagine it should work just fine. Then there's f-spot. This is a photo manager with a simple interface written in mono, and heavily promoted and developed by Novell. Again I haven't tried it, but will have a look at it some time soon.

You can discuss this howto on the forums.