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 |
Jump to:
[ Index of Craig's Columns | Main
Columns Page | Computer America Home Page ]
|