DCE Autoenhance

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.mediachance.com/dce/index.html">http://www.mediachance.com/dce/index.html</a><br /><br />I'm a huge digital photography fan, so when I came across this tool I wanted to pass it along - I'm always looking for better software tools to help me as a digital photographer, and this tool is very interesting. I just started using it yesterday, but it's very powerful. I was particularly impressed with how it enhanced low-light shots. I've never encountered a tool before that uses the EXIF data from the digital camera to help it make educated guesses on how to improve your photos. Now that's smart! There's a good demo you can download to see how it works. Decent price tag too!<br /><br /><img src="http://www.mediachance.com/dce/interface.jpg" /><br /><br />• Works in a Single Image mode or in a Batch mode <br />• Takes metadata information about the shot in the consideration <br />• Combines many different tools into one <br />• Can automatically print a date when the shot was taken directly on your image <br />• It gives you instant overview of the final look and detail <br />• Has build-in loseless rotation tool <br />• Powerful filter for portrait photography cleans the models skin and enhance the tones. <br />• Automatically set the balance <br />• Can automatically adjust the quality of JPEG differently for each image <br />• Keeps the EXIF info in result images <br />• Can resize using high quality 2 pass filter or Lanczos 3 <br />• Allows you to add a text on every image such as your copyright message etc.

[eosd30]

Looks interesting, especially the batch processing. Am downloading the demo now and will give it a whirl.

What I wish someone would come up with (and I haven't found yet) is an option to auto-rotate when importing photos ... so that photos shot in portrait mode automatically appear right side up when viewed.

BTW, in case you can't tell from my login name, I'm also waaay into digital photography ... started in Jan of 2001 and am hooked beyond belief, much to my wife's dismay. I started out with a Nikon CP800, moved on to a Canon Pro90IS (fantastic camera, but had to sell it) and now use a Canon D30, and am slowly working my way down the list of Canon lenses from the B&H catalog hehehe.

Hey Jason, are your photos online anywhere? I'd love to check them out.

Here's some of my stuff:

www.pbase.com/piranha/bangkok
www.pbase.com/piranha/nurockawards
www.pbase.com/piranha/nyc
www.pbase.com/piranha/musikomundo
www.pbase.com/piranha/boardwalk

You can also just check out the main gallery for various other misc photos.

Vic Icasas
Manila, Philippines

[Jason Dunn]

What I wish someone would come up with (and I haven't found yet) is an option to auto-rotate when importing photos ... so that photos shot in portrait mode automatically appear right side up when viewed.


What kills me is that not all cameras do this. My ancient Kodak DC265 did this automatically, but the Canon S110 I have doesn't. Sounds like your expensive camera doesn't do it either. :-)


BTW, in case you can't tell from my login name, I'm also waaay into digital photography


Great pictures! Nice framing and excellent "moment in time" shots.


Hey Jason, are your photos online anywhere? I'd love to check them out.


Not really - my photos aren't as good as yours anyway. :-)

[eosd30]

What kills me is that not all cameras do this. My ancient Kodak DC265 did this automatically, but the Canon S110 I have doesn't. Sounds like your expensive camera doesn't do it either.

How did your DC265 detect the diff between portrait and landscape? I'm no engineer, but I always figured some sort of gravity sensor that could detect any change in orientation would do the trick. Or, heck ... my D30 has a battery grip with a "portrait" shutter, it's as simple as detecting whether I used Shutter A or Shutter B.


Great pictures! Nice framing and excellent "moment in time" shots.


Thanks. Right now I'm actually trying out a roll of chromogenic B&W (i.e. can be processed by a color lab) film on my wife's EOS50, just for the novelty of it. I hate having to wait a day or two til you see your photos. It's downright stupid :D

And just to keep things barely on topic, do you use your PPC in any way for your digital photography?

vic

[GregWard]

Sounds really good - thanks for the tip. I still haven't found anything digital to match my Nikon F4 or Medium Format Pentax - I can't afford the Digital Nikon! But I do use a Sony P1 a lot for snapshots. Great camera but it often suffers from bad exposure in low light situations.

[Sven Johannsen]

I hate having to wait a day or two til you see your photos. It's downright stupid :D

vic


You kids. I remember having to wait two weeks to get shots back from my Brownie. Had to load and unload that in the closet BTW. :)

[Scott R]

I look forward to trying this out later. I have a lowly Canon S100 which I love because it's so tiny that it's easy to take along (though I still end up having my wife put it in her purse when we plan on taking it with us). It takes great pictures too. My main complaint is that the zoom is too small (2x). The next digital camera I get will have a big zoom. I'm interested in the Olympus (10x) or older Sony (8x - which I think can use floppys or memory sticks).

As I said, though, I'm usually pretty happy with the pics that my camera puts out without much/any tweaking. Where I have my biggest problems is with the pictures that I scan on my Plustek scanner. They're awful. But at the time is was the cheapest scanner which offered slide scanning. I'm not sure if poor quality slide scanning is better than no slide scanning at all. With scanners so cheap these days I should probably just buy a new one.

Scott

[wrongsanchez]

I've used this software before.....although it's no Photoshop, it does some basic enhancing that can add a little appeal, particularly on lower resolution images. I have a D1, and it was a little too canned for what I like to do to my images, but on stuff I clicked with my web cam, it cleaned them right up.

As for rotating images, I use ThumbsPlus - www.cerious.com - for basic viewing (again, not a Photoshop replacement) and it has a Quick Process, Rotate function where you can select all your horiz that should be vert images and turn them at once. Not quite out of the camera, but quicker than opening each one up in an editing program to rotate.

What I'm excited to see is what Foveon - www.foveon.com - puts out in lower end cameras. If everything works out as they say, we'll really have some neat toys to play with in the $300-400 price range by years end. In case you haven't been following, they have the X3 powered Sigma due out in May - http://www.sigma-photo.com/ - but it's still a bit more of the pro-sumer range.

Paul

[wrevans]

Just downloaded this, it's not bad. I have 2 cameras an older Kodak DC215 and a new Minolta S404, both do a good job, but,
some time I need to do some adjusting to get what I want and the DCE Autoenhance did the job.

[Jason Dunn]

How did your DC265 detect the diff between portrait and landscape?


I'm not sure to be honest. It could be as simple as having an orientation sensor in the camera...but it's a feature I miss on my Canon camera because it's SO lame to have to re-orient them all by hand, and you have to use a tool that modifies the file orientation information, NOT the file itself (or you have JPEG compression loss). ACDSEE 4.0 is on my black-list now because they took out the easy right-click rotation function from 3.x. Grr. And the performance of ACDSEE under XP seems to really suck. I'm longing for a good, quick image viewer.


And just to keep things barely on topic, do you use your PPC in any way for your digital photography?


I've gone as "hard core" as doing some photo editing on it using Pocket Artist from www.conduits.com, but day to day the most I usually do is pop in the CF card and view/delete the pictures just because the screen on the Pocket PC is nice and big compared to the camera. :-)

[Jason Dunn]

What I'm excited to see is what Foveon - www.foveon.com - puts out in lower end cameras. If everything works out as they say, we'll really have


Agreed - the X3 is trutly ground-breaking. The real question is whether any of the big OEMs (Canon, Sony, Olympus, Nikon) pick up the sensor and use it or if they stick to their guns and try to develop it themselves. I really fear it will be the latter.

I'm trying to pick a new digital camera myself - been trying for a year now - but every camera seems to have some serious compromises. I had my heart set on the Fujifilm 6900Z, the specs looked awesome, but the LCD viewfinder put a big crimp on that lust, and the camera design seemed a wee bit clunky.

&lt;sigh>

No one is making the perfect camera - what's wrong with these people? :wink:

[Jason Dunn]

I have a lowly Canon S100


The S100 was notorious for poor skin tones - you might like this app quite a bit for colour balance adjustments.