I have been asked by several friends on an Internet dog forum how to reduce or eliminate the glowing eyes of dogs when shooting with a P&S camera with onboard flash. I don't shoot with a P&S so I can't experiment to reduce that eye glow. I tried experimenting with the onboard flash of my Canon DSLR cameras but, this flash doesn't seem to cause the Glow Eye effect. (see attached image for onboard flash experiment)

Of course, "glow eye" is caused by the flash being too close to the lens and the flash being reflected back from the retina. The "glow eye" is basically the same as red-eye for humans which is caused by the same set of circumstances. However, it doesn't appear that the red-eye reduction on a P&S will correct the "glowing eye" effect in dogs. Additionally, it doesn't appear that the automatic red-eye correction in many editing programs will recognize the "glowing eye" in dogs and correct it.

Obviously I told the people that the very best way to eliminate "glowing eye" would be to use a flash that you can bounce. However, that would require a hotshoe on your camera which many P&S cameras do not have.

Another possibility might be to increase the ambient light enough so that the dog's pupils would contract. However, many people do not have the capability of increasing the ambient light in their homes to that level. An inexpensive Home depot work light would suffice but, they are darned dangerous around animals due to the heat generated.

The only way I can think of to eliminate the "glowing eyes" might be to not have the dog looking directly into the camera when shooting the picture. This of course would completely solve the problem but, lots of folks like to have the dogs looking into the camera.

Is there any way you can think of to bounce or somehow diffuse the on camera flash of a P&S to prevent glowing eye?

I have tried to reduce glowing eyes in dogs by using the clone stamp in Photoshop. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Additionally, most people have only the editing program that they got with their camera or some other freebie image editor.

Is there any way that you can reduce/eliminate glowing eye using a simple editing program?

Hi Richard,

I think you aren't getting feedback on this because there is no good answer.

My advice is to stick with natural light and always force the P&S flash off. Also, the work lights at Home Depot are not dangerous if you use the clamp on lights with porcelain bases AND you replace all the bulbs with compact florescent bulbs, so that is also a possibilty.

A more elegant solution is to find a cheap slave booster like the Quanterray units that Ritz used to sell for $10-$15 and put it to the front and side of the animal, then block your p&S flash from hitting the animal but don't block it so much that the slave doesn't fire. These won't work with cameras that employ a preflash. Google search on "slave flash booster" or "wireless slave flash"