PhotoGenetics

I think I'm color blind or artistically challenged because no matter what program I use to clear up the pics I've taken with my digital camera they always come out looking funky, often a lot worse then before I started editing. There are so many variables to adjust (color, contrast, brightness, etc.) Before you know it I've got a real mess on my hands. What starts out as a picture of my cat ends up looking like some weird radiated, glowing monkey sitting on the surface of the sun.

I'm not that bad at most other areas of photoshop but God forbid I have to do color correction. What I really needed was something that worked great but yet at the same time was simple to use. I found just such a gem called PhotoGenetics. It may sound like some type of DNA splicing, but it's a really interesting new way to work with digital images.

Unlike most editing programs and plug-ins that require adjusting knobs and sliders to fine tune an image, PhotoGenetics uses an almost entirely visual approach. You're initially presented with two images, your original picture and its clone already slighted edited by PhotoGenetics. You compare the one on the right with the original one on the left and rank it using a small slider bar. You can rank the new picture anywhere from "no change in quality/worse than before" to anywhere from 1%-100% better.

PhotoGenetics makes a number of internal calculations and decisions based on your response. It then changes the image as required. Every time you rank the new picture it gets a better idea of what you want. A set of four rankings is referred to as a "generation" (as in evolution, etc., which is why they use the genetic metaphor). It usually takes a few sets of generations to get satisfaction but you can stop at any time. When you do stop you can then compare the original version of the image against the new one. More times the retouched images are improved. The level of improvement varies and depends a lot on several factors such as how bad the picture was to start with, or if your ratings were out of whack when you used PhotoGenetics, etc.