Photobot - easiest digital picture correction
Photobot is the easiest digital picture correction software for your “significant other”, but it might even have some applications for the busy professional.
I was introduced to Photobot at the 2007 PMA show in Las Vegas, where it was slated as “The World’s first Zero-Click picture correction software!” The makers claim you can get amazing digital pictures without lifting a finger.
Intrigued, I took home a free 30-day trial CD-ROM and installed the software onto my wife’s PC, for two reasons: 1) The software is not targeted for professional photographers, but is marketed more for the amateur picture taker, and 2) because it won’t run on my Mac (only on Windows 2000 or XP systems).
Now, before you professional types get immediately turned off to Photobot, let me remind you of all those people who constantly bug you to fix THEIR digital images because you’re a “professional photographer”, and it’s so “easy” for YOU! Yeah, right. And the next thing you know, you’ve spent three hours correcting their images because the exposure and color are so bad, but your professional pride won’t let you stop until you get it perfect, and you swear you’ll never let yourself get talked into this again, then you turn right around and do it again for someone else next week.
Before this happens again, turn them onto Photobot and say, “Let me tell you about a less than $30 program that’ll do this for you, and it has a zero learning curve.” Or, you can use Photobot yourself and continue to look cool, but invest only the time it takes to burn a new CD for the corrected images.
I don’t want you making any rash recommendations, so let me assure you that Photobot can do what it claims. I was impressed. It really does not requires you to learn anything or do any clicking, and it will automatically 1) brighten and correct all your bad exposures, 2) give your pictures more vibrant and lifelike color, and 3) reduce any red-eye the camera has failed to correct.
Although Photobot is a brand new software product, it is actually a combination of three older pieces of software that have been integrated together. Tribeca Labs, the makers of Photobot, have taken their $49.00 Photoshop plug-in, Full Spectrum RGB, and added an average auto correction into Photobot. As a stand-alone product for professionals (running on Mac or PC), Full Spectrum RGB is the only technology that expands the spectral capabilities of digital cameras to reproduce all the colors of the visual spectrum, and won the 2006 DIMA Innovative Digital Product Award (http://www.fullspectrumrgb.com.com). You might want to add this product to your list of Photoshop plug-ins, and use their custom sliders for optimum color spectrum control.
Perfectly Clear by Athentech Imaging (http://www.athentech.com) is the second component that has been licensed and added to Photobot. Perfectly Clear applies the physics principles of light to correct the exposure of every picture. This is the same technology that many professional labs use to brighten dark images, and the software won the 2005 DIMA Innovative Digital Product Award.
Red Eye by FotoNation (http://www.fotonation.com) is the third component that has been added to Photobot. Red Eye is the industry leading red-eye removal technology with a success rate of approximately 70%-80% and an industry-best false positive rate of only about 1%. Red Eye is embedded in over 50 million high-end digital cameras. Whatever red-eye your digital camera fails to correct, Photobot almost always finds and fixes.
Here are a few before and after samples of how Photobot corrected some of our family snapshots. It easily corrected all the red-eye shots. It really is quite remarkable. Exposure correction was dead-on. Photobot does improve color vibrance, but on some images, a pro could do a little better with a custom slider control in Full Spectrum RGB’s stand-alone plug-in, or with other Photoshop controls, i.e. hue and saturation. Photobot was not smart enough to change the pictures I shot under orange-looking tungsten lighting to a more natural daylight balance, but I was pleased on most everything else. All images below, Copyright Linda and Royce Bair 2007:
For most images Photobot does a better job at preserving the highlights, while improving contrast, than you can do by manually setting the white point and changing the gamma in Photoshop’s Levels, or by using the auto exposure control in Levels or Curves.
Here’s an enlarged section of the Pika picture (a rodent that lives in the high alpine regions of North America) showing three different different methods of exposure correction, and Photobot wins, hands down.
All three images have the specular highlights on some of the whiskers as the brightest part of the image (value 255), but the lightest fur on the Pika’s neck is also starting to blow out to value 255 in some areas on the “Photoshop manual set white point” image, and is totally blow out on the “Photoshop auto exposure in ‘Curves’” image. Photobot has more accurately preserve the detail of these delicate highlights because it’s patented Perfectly Clear anti-clipping technology analyzes every pixel and compares how each relates to the total image.
The hardest part of running Photobot is installing the software, and even that was fairly easy. Photobot is made to run constantly in the background, looking for new digital image files that you’ve added to your hard drive, where upon it automatically finds and corrects them.
I recommend that you make one custom change when installing the software, and that is to designate a folder or directory that Photobot will only look for image files to correct, and where the user will place any new images for Photobot to correct. Why? Because Photobot will correct the original image file and overwrite it to the same file name. (Photobot does allow you to revert back to the original if you want that option.) For amateurs, I guess this isn’t a problem, because the new image is better than the old one, it’s just that I always like to preserve the original file in a separate place in case I need to fall back to it.
Whenever Photobot discovers new images to correct, a small window pops up on your screen, and you can see the software working in the background as it “wipes” across your images one-by-one to process and correct them. With some dark and underexposed images, it’s as if Photobot wipes them clean with new bright colors! Processing time on my wife’s computer (Athlon 64 3000 Plus 1.8GHz, running Window XP) was about 11 to 12 seconds per image.
Some pros may find little use for Photobot because it will not process RAW files, only JPEGs. However, for many personal projects, I’d love to let Photobot handle the correction. When Photobot corrects and overwrites the original JPEG file, it does it at about a Photoshop “8” compression quality. My Canon EOS 20D full-size (23 MB), fine-quality JPEG files are typically about 1.7 to 2.9 MB right out of the camera. After correcting these images and re-writing them, Photobot reduces them to a new JPEG file size of 350 to 750 KB. That may sound like an awful drop in quality, but close examination at 100% shows little visible image deterioration or artifacts.
PRO APPLICATIONS? Photobot could be useful for professionals. Remember how well Photobot protected the highlight detail in the Pika example? Few professional jobs have more delicate highlights than wedding photography. If you shoot weddings, you might consider setting you camera to shoot in RAW and also save a medium size JPEG image. You can let Photobot process those JPEGs for proofing. Once the bride and groom have chosen their final enlargement images from those proofs, then manually process only those selected images from the RAW files—saving a ton of time and work. Even if you have a Photoshop Actions script that you like, you might want to give Photobot a try.
CHEAP IMAGE ARCHIVING. One reason Photobot may have in reducing the file size on the overwrite is to keep Internet file transfer times and storage space to a minimum. That’s important because Photobot has set up a Swiss Picture Bank to archive all your digital images. Photobot can automatically transfer your corrected files over the Internet to a Swiss bank where they will remain safe and accessible for generations to come. A free 3-month trial of their Swiss Picture Bank comes with Photobot. The execs at Photobot were still working out the pricing details when I called for more information, but they’re planning to offer 30-year archiving for as little as a penny an image!
FREE TRIAL COPY. Photobot is currently only $29.95. For more information on Photobot, and a free 10-day trial copy of the software, go to their web site at http://www.photobot.com.
Posted by Royce Bair on 03/15 at 03:36 PM
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