DC AutoEnhance Automatic Digital Camera Enhancer and Batch Processor By Larry Anders, Librarian, Tampa PC Users Group Larry@AndersNet.com

Many of us by now have bitten the bullet and purchased a digital camera. With the prices ranging from $79 to well over a $1000, there is a price range for almost everyone. I know because I am on my second one and considering a third.

Although the photographs from digital cameras have gotten much better since my first Sony Mavica of five years ago, they are still not perfect. They all seem to need a little something, whether it be brightening, sharpening or something to make it perfect. Now, I am not saying that the photos I take with a regular film camera are all perfect, but in some sense there’s not much I can do about them once the picture is developed and printed, unless I want to scan them in one at a time and “fix” them. At least the digital photos are somewhat ready to be “fixed”, or probably better put, adjusted to your liking.

Most any graphics program today will import the image produced by your camera and let you make the adjustments you deem necessary. I have reviewed a few of those programs in this newsletter in the past, such as: JASC Paint Shop Pro, Adobe PhotoShop Elements, and my favorite, because it is free, Digital Camera Enhancer from MediaChance. The one problem I have with all the above software is that only one photo at a time can be processed. Most of the time that is okay, but recently I published a large amount of pictures to my website and it took a couple of hours to prepare the photos. By preparing I also mean resizing for optimal loading on a PC that doesn’t have a broadband Internet connection. Two hours to process these photos was totally unacceptable, so I went looking.

NOTE: William LaMartin, our newsletter Editor and Webmaster, tells me that Adobe PhotoShop can batch process graphic images. But at over $600 for the latest version 7, and a learning curve that will take me into the next millennium, I decided to look elsewhere. (PhotoShop is no doubt the best program of its kind on the market for professionals, which I am not.)

I searched the Internet and found a few programs and almost wrote an article on EyeBatch Image Processor, until I visited MediaChance’s website, http://www.MediaChance.com, again and found my favorite program had been upgraded to a commercial batch-processing program called DCE AutoEnhance (DCE). (The free version is still available under the camera tools section.) There is a fully functional evaluation version of DCE available for the download. The only restrictions on the eval version is that you can only batch process five photos at one time and the evaluation period is only good for 30 days. That is more than enough to put DCE through its paces. It only took me five minutes to know this program belonged in my arsenal of tools. Enough for the history… on with the review.

DCE has all of the tools of its free sibling but it also goes quite a bit further when adjusting and enhancing batches of photos. I know what you’re thinking: “How can you adjust all photos the same if each one was taken at different times, under different conditions.” Well, MediaChance uses something called Exif Metadata that your digital camera stores with the images and processes that data accordingly. (I didn’t know my camera stored anything other than the image.) So DCE knows whether the shot was taken with or without flash, in the day or night, etc., and adjusts itself accordingly.

Some of the features shown and talked about at http://www.mediachance.com/dce/features.html are:

• Automatic Balance (Most digital photos are a little dark. This will balance out the light and contrast.)
• Remove Blue cast (Removing the extra blueness brings the sharp color back.)
• Adjust Mid-tones
• Enhance Colors (With this you can give a boost to the colors – without over-processing them.)
• Enhance Details
• Remove Hot Pixels (This removes the “dust” or white dots from photos that have a longer exposure time – like evening shots without a flash.)
• De-noise the image (The new high mega-pixel cameras might add more detail than we really need. This filter smoothes out the roughness while leaving the needed detail in.)
• Portrait De-Focus Filter (This was included especially to smooth out skin tones.)
• Resize the image (This is the real time saver for me. I feel I get a better photo by taking higher resolution snapshots and then reducing the size before uploading to the web. This may or may not be true, but it makes me feel better.)
• Finds the JPG quality for each image according your needs.
• Add a text or Exif data such as date of shot taken, shutter speed, ISO etc. into the image with great control about the colors and parameters (You have full control over the size, font, color, background color and transparency and position. I haven’t seen this ability in other digital processing software up to this point.)

Don’t forget, most of the above mentioned features are all automatic, but if you get that one photo that you think needs a little more tweaking, there are manual adjustments on just about all of the features.

Because of the time it had taken me in the past to prepare my photographs for the web, I had actually all but stopped, or rather slowed down considerably, taking pictures to post on the Internet. This past Christmas I took a great deal of pictures that never made it to my website. They will now, a few months late, but what’s wrong with Christmas in July. I just got a Christmas present in April when I found DC AutoEnhance, and you can too. Just go to: http://www.mediachance.com/dce/index.html, download the evaluation version and you can see what I’m talking about. You’ll be surprised to find out your digital photos aren’t really as good as you thought they were, but they can be - I guarantee it!

If you decide that DCE does the job for you, send MediaChance the $35 registration fee so they’ll keep making good software. And, while you’re at their website, look around. There’s a lot of other good stuff to try out.  u