PhotoBot provides automatic touchups to your pictures
By Darren Murph 
posted September 27th 2006 1:07AM
posted September 27th 2006 1:07AM
Sure, you might have an exorbitantly expensive DSLR, or maybe you've forked out for a digicam touting OIS, but even the most brilliant photographs can't truly shine without a little TLC in the post-processing lab. While a bit of Photoshop or Aperture work can go a long way, the process itself can become a bit grueling, and Tribeca Labs is aiming to take time out of the equation and make touchups as good as automatic. Its PhotoBot software runs in the background of any Windows XP / 2000 PC (better fire up Boot Camp, dear Mac users) and automatically sniffs out freshly loaded pictures. Once located, the 'Bot works its magic without so much as a confirmation click, and Tribeca claims the program will brighten dark images, reduce red-eye, enhance colors, and take the guesswork out of perfecting a photo. Additionally, it will upload your pics to a "Swiss Picture Bank" (for a $5 / month fee, of course), so you can presumably rest easy knowing your precious files are residing safely on redundant storage halfway across the world. While we can't say for sure how well this contrivance actually works, nor how heavy it relies on system resources, you might as well give it a spin while it's still in beta (read: free). [Via CNET]
But Picasa from Google already does every single function mentioned here. And its no bot but photo enhancement is so damn easily done, it may as well be one. It also lets you email photos from a gmail account, with or without compression.Best of all its free, so no guilt trips if you want the purchase verion( yeah right). If this is how Google plans to take over the world, man, they are so welcome! Next, i'd like a video editing software that is as effortless to use,really
Jerry, I believe you missed the point of PhotoBot. Having a uber-fast, multi-way machine won't do you any good if you have to sift though and manually select what effect/touch-up to put to apply to your pictures. At that point the user is the bottleneck. A program that can intelligently determine what to do with a photo, without ruining it, would be a killer app for professional photographers. A shoot can be anywhere from fifty to thousands of photos. Being a pro Photographer myself, I can tell you going through that many pictures sucks!
Picasa: While I agree that Picasa is a must have tool for any Photographer ( in my opinion ), I'd like to point out that Picasa's photo editing leaves a lot to be desired. I appreciate Picasa's user interface and light memory footprint. Best of all the photo organizer is hands down the best I've seen. I even enjoy the easy to use touch-up tools. Unfortunately, depending on the effect you select, the resulting picture comes out blurry, over-saturated, leveled badly or all of the above. As for the "Auto Correction" button, it's damn near useless. Image manipulation is a complex science/art. Adobe's image processing algorithms are superior because they have to be. Catering to the pro market for many years has put a tremendous amount of research into said algorithms. That and hiring a lot of very smart Computer Science folk. There are shortcuts (i.e. less complex methods) for image manipulation. Many of which are widely used/known. Not that Google is wrong for using them. It should be noted that the Picasa tool is consumer, which allows for moderately lower tolerances. In this case we are referring to the quality of the output image. While the tool has it's strong point's, it's not an end all solution to photo editing. For me, using Picasa for touch-ups will mean my pictures will lose some of their fidelity and that's not something I'm willing to overlook.
Short answer: I gonna fool with PhotoBot and see if the hype is justified. In the meantime I'll continue to use both Photoshop for touch-ups and Picasa for organizing my work.
"Being a pro Photographer myself, I can tell you going through that many pictures sucks!"
I don't think the purpose of this is to help weed out the keepers which is what you seem to be suggesting here.
OK, MAYBE this might be useful for wedding photographers, but not very good ones. The good ones will want to tailor each image or apply filters and/or adjustments that aren't going to be available with this program.
It's also useless for anyone that shoots RAW. Photoshop already has the auto adjustments for exposure, contrast, etc. And redeye? What's that?
(I'm not a pro but I play one on TV)
http://www.pbase.com/eclecticphoto/
I'm using the Photobot beta right now and it does what is says (automatic fixes and all) and works great. The only downside is that it only fixes photos in 'my pictures' folder right now. Anyone know when the full version will be available for sale?
Sure Oni i was just speaking as a lazy occasional photog, not a pro! yes adobe is superior, i am not even going there (adobe vs picasa). i appreciate the amount of time and effort you have taken on your reply. thank you!
I actually prefer smugmug to picasa. I will definitely give this photobot thing a try, if it works half as well as advertized it should be quite useful.... my only concern is sometimes "auto" touchups tend to destroy details in the name of balancing color levels, contrast, etc. I just hope any "touchups" it does can be undone easily and that they are not destructively overwriting the originals.
hey jeff i'll be sure to check smugmug out...
This is definately not aimed at people with exhorbitantly expensive SLR's (like myself). There is no way this can do what I normally do in Photoshop to achieve the look I want for a particular photo. I see this as aimed more at Kodak Easyshare toting moms.
A quick glance at any pic will tell you if it's worth salvaging or not. Who the hell needs a tool for that ;) By "going through" I was refering to the whole process of performing basic touch-ups to the photo's that need it. I guess that was a poor use of words on my part. It brings to mind my Grandparents flipping through their old photo's trying to decide what goes in the "Ole Tyme" Photo Album. *sigh* Mmmmm ginger snaps and skim...