"White Eye" Removal?

[Jason Dunn]

Red eye removal is a common tool in digital photo editing applications, but having recently shot a lot of photos in Mexico of a stage performance, and I saw a lot of something I'd never seen before: "white eye". When shooting photos of animals, I'll sometimes see "green eye", but I think this white eye effect is related to constantly shifting stage lights that they were using. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/white-eye-small.jpg
[click for full image] (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/white-eye-full.jpg)

The right eye was fixed with red eye reduction in ACDSEE 8, but the white one was not. That didn't surprise me, mind you, because I know that the technology looks for red pixels, not white ones. Short of loading it into Photoshop Elements and painting over the white with black pixels, does anyone know of any programs that can deal with this problem? In a similar vein when I take photos of my dog in low light, she tends to get "green eye", and I have a similar problem. Given the number of pet photos that people take, you'd think someone would have come up with a solution for this by now.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

This is an extreme form of red-eye, and I don't think there's much you can do, save for reconstructing the eye yourself.

What has happened here is that the inner eye has reflected so much of the light that the green and blue channels have are very close to clipping. Since most red-eye techniques I know of only remove information from the red channel, they won't be up to the task of removing the reflection, since it's still there in the green and blue channels.

My advice for avoiding reflections like these is to use an external flash, and bounce the light from it if necessary. If you often run into situations where you still get redeye with an external flash, but cannot use bounce flash techniques (open air, high ceilings or strongly coloured ceilings), then you might want to consider buying a flash bracket designed to increase the distance of the flash from the lens..