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February 2006 1) Red Eye Tutorials 2) An Extra Red Eye Question 3) Circular Selection Quick Tip 4) Free Brushes ----------------------------------------------------- Red Eye Tutorials ----------------------------------------------------- Red eye is a problem that just about every photographer has struggled with at some point. Don't put up with it any longer! Find out a few easy steps you can take to eliminate it in your existing photos, and avoid it in the future. There are a few simple things you can do to minimize the effect of red eye: Check you really need to use a flash - Sometimes the picture doesn't actually need this extra lighting, and so you can eliminate the cause of red eye altogether. Use a detached flash - If you can distance the flash from the camera lens, the light will not be reflected back directly vastly minimizing red eye. Reflected flashes - If you can angle the flash on your camera, try reflecting it off of nearby walls or ceilings. Red eye reduction features - Whilst not as effective as some other techniques, some cameras have pretty good built in red eye reduction, so this is worth a try. If you haven't checked out my five articles on red eye yet, then take a look at: http://www.easyelements.com/red-eye.html ----------------------------------------------------- An Extra Red Eye Question ----------------------------------------------------- I received a question via my contact form this week asking: "I understand what causes redeye, and what can be done to prevent it. Are there certain situations that will increase the likelyhood of redeye? Such as a well lit room as opposed to a darker one." The answer is a definite yes! There certainly are various conditions that will increase or decrease the severity of the red eye effect. When a human is in a dark room, their pupil opens up much more to try and let in as much light as possible, so that they can see better. This dilation means that when a flash is fired at the eye, the red eye effect will be much, much worse. If you took the same flash and the same person, but placed them in a brightly lit room with white walls (which help reflect light well), the person's pupil would be a lot smaller, and the red eye would be much less severe. Indoor and outdoor conditions also affect this matter significantly. If you take pictures of people outdoors on a sunny day, you are much less likely to see the effects of red eye strongly, than if the person was inside. ----------------------------------------------------- Circular Selection Quick Tip ----------------------------------------------------- When making circular selections in Photoshop with the marquee tool, there are some useful key functions many people miss. The Alt key will place the center of the selection at the cursor, instead of its corner. The Shift key will force the selection to be a circle, instead of an ellipse. The Space Bar will allow the selection to me moved with the cursor. Read more about these features at: http://www.easyelements.com/circular-selection.html ----------------------------------------------------- Free Brushes ----------------------------------------------------- I've recently created two completely free brush sets for you to download and use. The first is a set of star brushes, available for download here: http://www.easyelements.com/photoshop-star-brush-set.html After the popularity of that brush set, and in the run up to Valentine's day, I created an even larger set of heart brushes with over 25 brushes. Download those brushes here: http://www.easyelements.com/photoshop-heart-brush-set.html Why not send a loved one a little hand-made Valentine's e-card? I hope you find those brushes useful. ----------------------------------------------------- That's it for this issue, I hope YOU found YOUR newsletter useful! Please do E-Mail me with any requests for the March edition of Elements Express, as all these requests go into the making of my next newsletter. Any other comments or requests for this newsletter? Just let me know via my contact page here: http://www.easyelements.com/contact.html Until next time! Kind Regards, Robert Redwood. |
