by Dick Reaser, LACS

AutoEye 1.0 , hereinafter referred to as AE, is a utility for enhancing digital images for print or web. It is truly unique in that it will operate as stand alone or as a plug-in for those graphic programs that adhere to the Photoshop plug-in standards. AE examines, and then automatically enhances digital images providing full spectrum color correction, increased color vibrancy, contrast & sharpness, and rebuilt detail. AE automatically removes moiré patterns that occur when scanning printed images and features a basic dust and scratch remover. It uses I.V.I.T (Intelligent Visual Imaging Technology), a patented process, which reclaims color that is lost when taking a digital picture that is often too dark or gray to show the original colors.

It offers two modes of operation: Manual and Automatic. Visual feedback of all enhancements is easily viewed in the Manual mode which offers a large on-screen preview which has zoom and panning and shows Before and After previews. The Automatic mode just does its thing and saves the file and doesn’t offer you a view of what it has done. This is useful for production type work.

No auto-run installation here. Instead double click on the AutoEye.exe which is found on the AE CD. You have the choice of installing just the application, just the plug-in, or typical (which installs both the application and the plug-in version). There are detailed instructions of where to install the plug-in version depending upon what photo editing program you are using. I used "typical" so I could live in both worlds. I ended up working with the "stand alone" installation rather than using it as a plug-in to my Photoshop in an effort to keep things simpler.

It has two modes - Automatic and Manual. You choose which to use when you open the program. The stand alone version is drag-and-drop and will work with most popular image formats. You can either launch the program and load an image when you click Manual or Automatic or you can drag and drop images on AE and have them automatically processed.

In Automatic mode, the picture is analyzed by the software and subjected to a range of enhancements over which you have some say by using the general categories of enhancements by picking one of those built in or one which you have tailored for yourself. It brings dark or faded pictures to life by increasing contrast, color saturation and improving shadow detail. The program recognizes color casts and corrects them automatically. It also improves the crispness of the image by applying some sharpening. In many cases, a photo image can be adequately improved considerably by just letting AE do its own thing.

I tested this mode by just dragging and dropping a group of 50 photos I had recently taken at a 60th wedding anniversary party of some friends of ours. I don’t like to use flash in these situations. The results were pretty amazing. However, the program enhanced the wrinkles on these older folks faces (not a good thing in this case) and the black folks were still too much blended into the dark backgrounds. It saved all these photos in their original folder and added "ae" at the beginning of each file name but it also shortened the file names to about 11 characters before the extension with a "tilde number" considerably less length than my originals. I wish it didn’t do that. Not to worry, my originals were still there so I switched to Manual mode

In Manual mode, the image you start with has the same corrections you would see in Automatic mode. By holding down the Shift Key, you can switch back and forth to the original image for comparison.

Now, however, you have access to a comprehensive array of control sliders along with zooming and panning for close examination of the image. The following controls and sliders allow you to make further adjustments to the image: The Enhance Button is turned on by default, but can be disabled. It makes the same adjustments to your image that you would see in Automatic mode. The Reset Button resets all sliders to their default settings. The Enhance SubDetail feature will pull out more color quality and detail from darker images. This is the one that rescued my black faces on very dark backgrounds for me. An absolute miracle! The Colors slider allows you to control the amount of color adjustment the program makes to an image to correct problems such as removing a color cast. The Saturate slider increases or reduces the vibrancy of existing colors in the image. The Contrast slider adjusts the difference between light and dark areas in the image, and will make lighter and darker areas more defined. The Sharpen slider enhances details in the image using methods unique to AE. Most images will be fine with the default sharpen settings. This is the main one I used to de-wrinkle those older folks faces. The Anti-Noise slider helps reduce the noise that occurs in images that are sharpened and have increased contrast. The Brightness slider can make the overall image brighter or darker. This feature can improve some images that are naturally dark. The Tonal Range slider generally makes an image have greater or less color depth and tonal difference in the mid-tone areas. The Red, Green and Blue sliders allow you to make basic color adjustments. The Despeckle Button runs a filter over the image to remove any dust and scratches. The Anti-Moiré Button will help remove unwanted screen patterns from a scanned image.

You can save and recall your preferred settings which you create based on the types of images and the level of enhancements you prefer. I comes with the following settings: Default, Enhance Dark Image, Enhance Very Dark Image, Enhance Light Image, Enhance Very Light Image, Super Sharp & Vibrant. Of course, I have added Reduce Wrinkles on Friends Faces. It is simple to apply any of these settings at any time.

When the picture is the way you want it you can just do a "save as" for it. I wish that it defaulted to the original location and file name (so I could use the full old file name and add only a prefix like "ae". The program doesn’t seem to even know the name of the file that it is currently working on and doesn’t show any file names in any folder to show you what is already there.

I get around this by having Windows Explorer running in the background so I can know what files are there and can easily cut and paste file names from there. A second helpful feature for me is to have ThumbsPlus also running in the background. That way I can see thumbnails of photos to know what they are without having to load them into AE to find out.

There is a 13 page slick paper 7 by 9 inch User’s Manual pamphlet shipped with the unit. There is no table of contents, chapters, nor index. There are seven sections entitled: Quick Start, Introduction, Using AutoEye, Getting Started, Controls, Menus, and Troubleshooting which cover the bare essentials of the program. Actually, the program is somewhat intuitive and easy to use and there is built–in help that makes the manual less significant. There is Walk-Through of the program at their web site.

Tech support seems to mainly be by Web Site and you must be a registered owner to use it. They do have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section there.

AE is a delight for me. I’m mostly a left brainer so don’t have a lot of sense of artistry, style, shading, light, color and stuff like that. Even if I do know what I want, I usually have trouble setting the various tuners that are available for adjusting photos on typical graphic programs. This program gives me a great starting point from my humble mediocre photos. It fixes most of my bad lighting conditions, focus problems, color corrections, etc., with minor intervention on my part. I mostly take pictures without flash of old photos, people, animals, birds and flowers all of which AE does a fine job on. It is very smart and yet easy to use. Its patented Intelligent Visual Imaging Technology really does a fine job.

Windows 95/98/NT 3.0.1 - 4.0 or higher, Windows 2000 Pro/Server/ME; Minimum 32 MB RAM/64 MB recommended; Storage space 100 MB or more in disk space on your startup drive (for swap disk space); Supports most image editors that allow plug-ins, including: Adobe Photoshop 3 - 6, Photo Deluxe 2+, Corel Draw 7 - 9, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 5 - 7, Fractal Design Painter 5+

My System Consists of: AMD K6 3D 350MHZ processor, 128 MB RAM, Windows 98, 6.4 GB Hard Disk, Yahama DS XG sound card, NEC 6X 4 disk CD-ROM drive, US Robotics 56K V.90 internal FAX Modem, Xerox M760 Color inkjet printer, Umax Astro 3400 USB port flatbed scanner, Iomega ZIP 250 parallel port drive.