[lug] photo editor

[Wayde Allen]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Hugh Brown wrote:

> What specifically are you doing to get rid of the red-eye?  I don't know
> gimp very well at all, and like I said the site was down earlier.

As I indicated before, I usually try to eliminate red-eye in the photo
taking process itself.  That is almost impossible with most of the point
and shoot camera designs though, and that so-called red-eye reduction
feature with the double flash really is more of a marketing feature than a
useful tool in my opinion.  There are quite a few reasons NOT to use on
axis flash besides red-eye.  At any rate, the main thing to do is to move
the axis of the flash away from the main axis of the camera lens.  Red-eye
is caused by the light bouncing off of the retina, and if the flash hits
the subject at a different angle than you are photographing from, this
reflection won't be seen by the camera. 

Of course that solution may not be possible, so you scan your image and
work on it in the Gimp.  What I would probably do, note that I haven't
actually tried this, is zoom in on each eye, select this region, select
the occurrence of red in this region and re-map it to the normal eye color
for the subject.  Another option would be to simply select the subject's
eye color using the color picker and using a suitable paintbrush simply
color the red away.  The other possible solution I can think of would be
to setup the clone tool to copy the good eye coloring over the red
coloring.

The "real" Gimp guru on this list is Michael Hammel of Graphic Muse fame
<http://www.graphics-muse.org/>. He is the author of "The Artists Guide to
the Gimp"
http://www1.clbooks.com:80/asp/BookInfo/BookInfo.asp?theisbn=1578310113,
and can probably give you the click sequence needed to accomplish these
manipulations.  He quite likely has some other possibly better solutions
up his sleeve as well.  I know that he has been working on another book on
the Gimp as well as chairing the CLIQ expo project.  I'm hoping he'd like
to give us another presentation on this sometime this summer.

If you are interested in photography and/or digital photography keep an
eye on the Rocky Mountain Photographers Forum at http://rmp.opusis.com. 
I'm hoping we can build up a collection of digital photography
information that is not exclusively based on Photoshop. 


- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)