Red Eye Ridiculous

[amy_bb]

Hi all,

I shot my first Little Loop night football game on Friday. I used my 70-200mm f2.8 OSM lens and my SB700 to shoot the kids on a very poorly lit field.

I don't think I did too badly but here is my dilemma. With the flash and and the related refresh rate, I tried to compose and shoot carefully and capture the action in one shot rather than using the spray and pray method (which sometimes works/sometimes doesn't anyway).

In using the flash, I got some pretty nasty red eye. When I corrected the red eye in CS5, I got some pretty creepy ghost eyes instead.

Here are both shots---first uncorrected (cropped only)
second is corrected using the red eye reduction too.

Can someone tell me if there is a better way to do this and get more realistic looking eyes when faced with this situation again?


Camera
Nikon D7000

Exposure
0.002 sec (1/500)

Aperture
f/2.8

Focal Length
122 mm

ISO Speed
2500

Exposure Bias
0 EV

Flash
On, Return detected

[zona5101]

heres one of those times when a flash bracket is a good solution to get the flash off axis but short of buying new gear...I have had the same experience as you...LR does an ok job the majority of the time but once in a while you get the creepy eyes...I fix them by hand with a brush in PS.

[amy_bb]

Originally Posted by zona5101

heres one of those times when a flash bracket is a good solution to get the flash off axis but short of buying new gear...I have had the same experience as you...LR does an ok job the majority of the time but once in a while you get the creepy eyes...I fix them by hand with a brush in PS.

Thanks for your response!

I've been considering a flash bracket and if I end up shooting more night sports I will go that route.

I tried to fix it multiple ways in CS5 using brushes, fill bucket, cloning, etc. I tried to give the eyes their true color (this boy has blue eyes) but that looked super fakey.

When using the brushes, do you use a replacement color? I'm still not great at PP (which forces me to shoot better SOOC so I guess it's not all bad) so any instruction you could give would be appreciated. I do have LR3 but struggle terribly with it and therefore don't use it a lot.

[zona5101]

if you haven't, try the LR3 red eye brush. It's easy enough to use and does a decent job most of the time. For those ones that you can't fix with that tool (usually becaus!e the eyes come out white instead of red). Just a black brush over the pupil on a separate layer. Then you can adjust the opacity of the fill to make it look right. I don't know that I've ever tried to put color in the eye because usually its dark and you wouldn't naturally see the eye color. If you wanted it, again I'd put it on a separate layer and adjust opacity.