Craig Crossman photo Craig Crossman
National Newspaper Computer Columnist

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BACKGROUND UTILITY FIXES YOUR PHOTOS AUTOMATICALLY

Our computers do a lot of things in the "background." These housekeeping functions endeavor to keep our computers running more smoothly and efficiently. Your computer's operating system is rife with activity of which you are not aware and that's a good thing. Because if you had to do them manually, chances are you wouldn't do them at all. There's also a slew of utilities and applications that work in the background. Backup software is a good example.

Recent surveys show that less than 4 percent of us systematically perform backups. Yet we all know that if a disaster strikes, we'll be cooked but we still don't backup our computers. However, backup software that works in the background is becoming more and more common because software developers now know that we are willing to backup if we don't have to bother with it manually. Anti-virus software publishers knew about this a long time ago so that's why most AV utilities work in the background. But what about more mainstream applications that work in the background? They're beginning to surface as well.

Take digital photographs for example. There are more photo-manipulative applications out there than you can shake a stick at. Adobe's Photoshop continues to be the $695 gorilla at the top of the heap. But even the most simple of consumer-orientated photograph software still requires you to first run it, then load in the images you want to enhance or fix and then you have to probably read the manual on how to operate it no matter how simple the user interface is. But most digital camera users don't want to mess around with their photos. They just want their photos to be the best that they can be without having to do anything more. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a background application that would just go and find every digital photograph you have on your computer's hard drive and go about fixing them all without you doing anything? Well, there is now.

Photobot is billed as the world's first "Zero-Click" picture correction software. It works by doing everything in the background. After you install Photobot, you just go about whatever it is you normally do on your PC. Whenever it can, Photobot will seek out all of your digital photographs and begin to make them better. By better I mean fixing them in three categories of correction. They are red-eye reduction, brightening dark pictures and color correction. With most red-eye correction applications for example, you first have to identify each eye with some type of perimeter tool and then apply the correction. Photobot automatically identifies faces and corrects any red-eye problems.

The process of brightening images and color correction is done by examining the information in every pixel in the photograph and making tiny adjustments in each of them. This is a far more sophisticated and complex process than just applying a blanket of lightening and darkening which is how so many of the other photo-manipulative applications do it. The same holds true with color correction. When a shirt is purple but it comes out brown in the image, the shirt color is corrected back to purple without effecting the skin tones of the person wearing it. So the higher the megapixel count, the better the results will be with Photobot.

Again the concept here is automatic photo correction while you do other things. When you finally look at all of your images on the computer, they will just all look better and more natural. People will use this because they don't have to do anything. It just works. Photobot is squarely aimed at everyday, casual digital camera owners who just want the best pictures possible without having to do anything. Just off load the pictures from your digital camera to your computer as you normally do, but now they will all just look a whole lot better.

You don't burn any bridges with Photobot since it also automatically makes backups of the original images just in case you don't like something it did.  Simply right-click on any image and Photobot will undo that image to its original state. You also see a before and after image to compare.

Finally Photobot is including a free "Swiss Picture Bank" feature that uploads your images to the same secure data facility that provides data storage services to Swiss banks. If you lose a photo, you can easily reclaim it over the Internet.

Photobot sells for $29.95 and currently is available for Windows platform only computers.
 

www.photobot.com





Craig Crossman is a McClatchy-Tribune newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. He also hosts the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and technology, Computer America, heard on both the Business TalkRadio Network® and the Lifestyle TalkRadio Network®, weeknights at 10PM Eastern time.  Visit his website at http://www.computeramerica.com

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