erratic red eye removal

Since the upgrade to v.5 the red eye removal tool seems to have become erratic. I regularly import several photos at a time into a specific graphic, give them all an 8pix white border and drop shaddow, spread them over a multi page document then lastly do some basic re-touching. This usually means a fair bit of red eye removal. All done within the same document. Just the sort of rapid workflow at which Exreme excels.

With the upgrade to v.5 however everything seems to have got a bit confused. The red-eye tool steadfastly refuses to permit a red-eye circle less than so many pixels, i.e the greyed out circle won't go smaller than the entire eye, eyebrow and all! Then whenever the effect is applied to a photograph with a border it seems to insist that red-eye circle must also share that same border. This results in a wierd red outline to the greyed out area.

I should also mention that I had a fair few exception violations along the way. I'll try a uninstal / fresh-instal and see what happens. I just thought I'd fire this off to see if anyone else has experienced anything similar..

I've sort of identified the problem. The red-eye removal tool changes the photo to a clipped-photo-group so applying applying a border after using it is less staightforward. Applying red eye removal to a picture with a border has become impossible.

I guess that creating a bitmap copy of the retouched photo is the way to do this? So the workflow has just become a bit more convoluted. Import graphics - re-touch - create copies of all the clipped-photo-groups - delete the originals - apply borders to all the remaining photoraphic images.

This all seems a bit convoluted. The most straightforward approach would seem to be to revert to using v.4 rather than v.5 as this task, which I do regularly, was a lot simpler in v.4.

Am I missing something or is there something I should be doing differently in v.5?

i guess grouping the clipped photo groups would do it...

Hello Hamish, I can't replicate the problem here. the photo tool red eye works fine for me. Perhaps if you can post a .xar file it may help someone figure this out.

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Originally Posted by hamishmacd

The red-eye tool steadfastly refuses to permit a red-eye circle less than so many pixels, i.e the greyed out circle won't go smaller than the entire eye, eyebrow and all!

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Hold Ctrl and select the grey area and resize it as required using the size handles, or use the info bar size input.
Then use the feather slider to blend the edges into the photo.
You can even convert to editable shapes and use the curve handle to fine tune the grey shape.
For a border, I drop a new rectangle shape behind, size and centre it to the photo with the alignment tool. A drop shadow applied to the photo above a white border looks attractive.

Thank you both for taking the time to reply. I'd no idea the red-eye tool was that flexible.

I'll just get used to editing the photos first, grouping them, then applying the border and drop shaddow last. This is I suppose the more logical sequence.

You know you can always bypass the redeye tool in this version.

In older version the red eye tool only affected the colour red but in the newest version it affects all colours. All your doing in version 5 is drawing a black circle with saturation transparency, which is simply a way of making a colour photo into a black and white photo.

On your photo, try creating a big black square over part or all of it and apply the saturation transparency and you will see and understand better what is happening.........frank

Thanks Frank, I see what you mean. I was just a bit confused by this. Now I've had a chance to play around, I understand it better. It just feels out of kilter with the way I'm used to Xtreme working. A bit clunkier really. Why would you ever want a red eye tool to take on the outline properties of the photo upon which you are working? I found myself creating a huge red-eye circle, then removing the outline, then tweaking the red-eye area to scale. That said, the ability to squish the shape to fit an obscuring eye lid may come in handy.

This was always just a quick-fix when putting photos onto a video display that we use. It's slightly more involved now but now I get it, I can live with it.

Just out of a sense of completeness, in case this is of use to other readers, I solved the problems I was having. The solution was actually dead simple. I was dealing with some very low resolution graphics, which meant having to zoom right in. The 8 pix border that was applied to the photo was the problem. Because of the 8 pix border applied to the photo, Xara also applied this border to the red-eye thus it only gave me the option of a minimum of an 8 pix red-eye circle.

I was left with two solutions firstly to just to set the bit map editor as XPE and use the old red-eye tool from the previous version of Xara. This is what I'll probably do. It's not as flexible but it is quick. This method doesn't convert the photo to a clip view.

Alternatively I could apply the border first, deselect the photo and then apply the red-eye to it. Somehow Xara knows you are applying red eye to a particular photo without it being selected. This way the red-eye behaves normally.

I also ran into problems with the border disapearing the moment the photo was changed to a clip-view. The solution to this was equally simple. If you need to alter the border, but not to have the red-eye border affected, CTRL click just the photo and you can edit just its border without the red-eye border also being affected.

I noticed how many people read my post. I hope this is of use to someone.

I'm sure it will be. :) Thanks, Hamish.

Cheers for following this up Hamish. A truley strange bug. Thanks for the update.

Interesting and helpfull thread indeed, thanks!

One question though:
I'm absolutely totally inexperienced with red-eye removal, found a tutorial from Gary dating from back 2004.

As it seems red-eye tool creates a greyish zone.
Is - and how - it possible to modify the color of this 'grey zone' using the color picker?

If any pointer available to more recent tutorial / info about this matter, welcome!

Thanks for helping out!

Erwin

To be honest, I've stopped using the new red-eye-remover on the tool-bar of XXP5 as I don't think it is as useable as the earlier version. The earlier version is still available in V.5 by setting your bitmap editor to XPE. As Seagul mentioned, all the new one does is to create a circle with a saturation transparency. This is useful if you don't want a perfect circle because you can edit the shape. For example it's ideal if you need to remove red-eye from an iris which is partially obscured by an eye lid. Similarly if you want to edit the feathering you can do that now too. Most of the time however I just want to quickly touch up a photo, so I've reverted to using XPE. It's not non-destructive like the new one but that's not important to me 99% of the time.

The new red eye tool should however behave just as any shape. I'm at work just now so I can't verify this. If you want to change the outline colour then just use the colour picker to change the outline colour rather than the fill.

The main disadvantage I found with the new tool is that as it creates a shape within a clipview so you need to be very careful when applying anything else to the photo, like a border for example. Unless you deselect the red-eye-removal-circle the border is also applied to this. In my case it was this that created the strange grey border that initiated this post.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Seagull

You know you can always bypass the redeye tool in this version.

In older version the red eye tool only affected the colour red but in the newest version it affects all colours. All your doing in version 5 is drawing a black circle with saturation transparency, which is simply a way of making a colour photo into a black and white photo.

On your photo, try creating a big black square over part or all of it and apply the saturation transparency and you will see and understand better what is happening.........frank

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Cheers for that Frank, I wasn't aware of that! It also works fine darkening a white cloud, handy for creating various tinges :)

Stygg