Them There Eyes

Photographing people with a point-and-shoot camera presents a number of challenges, compared to a more capable camera system such as an SLR with an off-camera flash.

If you have to use flash, the built-in flash on the point-and-shoot camera can produce two undesirable affects, both due to reflection.

1. Red-eye, where the pupil of the eye appears red instead of the person's normal eye colour. This is caused by the flash light reflecting off the retina in the back of the person's eye.



2. If the person wear's glasses, you can easily catch an unwanted reflection off the lenses and even the frame of the glasses. The reflection can blot out part of the person's eye.



Once you've taken the shot there's not much you can do, other than try to fix the image using an image editor.

For red-eye, an image editor that supports layers with different blending modes is the way to go. There are a number of "recipes" (manual sequence of steps) for fixing red-eye. They'll take a few minutes per eye but the end result is excellent.

My current camera has a "remove red eye" feature which I haven't bothered to use. The camera also came with a basic but very usable image editor; however the "remove red eye" feature in the software is hopeless.

For reflections off a lens, the only reliable solution is to use the image editor to "paint in" the missing portion of the eye. For a small reflection this is relatively easy but it's more difficult to make a convincing job as the reflection gets larger, unless you're a good painter.