Olympus E-500 Red Eye Fix

My other articles related to the Olympus E-System cameras.

The Olympus E-500 has a feature more often met on entry-level cameras: red-eye removal. This is done after the picture has been taken, from the Edit menu available while the image is viewed on the LCD monitor.

While a more advanced user may prefer to do this when postprocessing the image on a computer, the feature does not bother me, as it does not crowd the (sparsely populated) Edit menu.

I wanted to check this feature out; to do that I needed a picture with the red eye effect. Easier said than done: even without the anti-red-eye pre-flash my wife and I were not able to get a single red eye picture among thirty or so shots we took indoors for this purpose with use of the built-in flash.

While visiting friends over Thanksgiving we had better luck. One of the casual snapshots taken in the kitchen resulted in a big, red eye in the family dog. Here is the full, reduced frame at the left, and original pixel size fragment at the right.

While previewing the taken picture you have to press the [Menu] button, scroll to the Play menu, choose the Edit option and then Red Eye. The camera will ask for confirmation; unfortunately you have no choice but press [OK], as you cannot enlarge the viewed image at that moment to inspect it better. The picture is then saved as a new file (with the next available serial number), done.

The result is shown, in full pixel size again, at the right. As we can see, the camera was able to identify the red eye correctly, and removed it by local desaturation and, perhaps, darkening. Not a bad job.

Note that the similar effect in the other eye was not removed. This is understandable: only a small part of the eye is visible, difficult for the program to identify as such.

OK, that's it. I wasn't able to find another example, so this is just a single case; I have no statistical information how often the procedure is successful, and how good are average results. In this case, however, the camera did a nice job, indeed,


My other articles related to the Olympus E-System cameras.

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Posted 2005/12/02 Copyright © 2005 by J. Andrzej Wrotniak.