Retina
Based on the latest neural network technology, Retina is a set of 22 adaptive filters for Photoshop to maximize perceived contrast, brightness, sharpness, depth and resolution. The effect is like removing a veil, or cleaning a coat of varnish from a painting, as the "before/after" shots on the vendor's website amply demonstrate.
Retina has 5 modes, called: Automatic, Portrait, Landscape, Macro, and Advanced, plus Batch mode. Automatic mode is the main user interface for the software, providing a single-click enhancement option, while the others are "second level" interfaces with controls. The Advanced mode control panel gives access to all the different functions, for: Texture, Lighting, Artifact Reduction, Color, and Perceptual/Absolute Tonal/Light functions. There are also command buttons for refresh, zoom, profile selection, reload, and save..
The main Retina function, itself called Retina, modifies local contrast pixel by pixel, while at the same time maintaining contrast in large areas of the picture. This makes a dramatic change, improving perceived sharpness, accentuating textures without increasing noise, and giving an apparent increase in depth. The other advanced functions, Digital Flash, Auto Color and Perceptual, all make a contribution to the impact of the image.
Comment
Retina makes an astonishing difference to photographs that lack punch, giving them all the punch they need (and in some instances, a bit too much). It is a genuinely intelligent product, based on research into human perception.
It imparts a super-real effect to each image, revealing detail in shadows and highlights automatically while sharpening the picture as well. Although it is not at all flattering to portraits of women, which tends to rule out a large section of the market, for buildings, landscapes and especially underwater photography it is truly outstanding.
Retina supports 8 and 16-bit RGB color, grayscale and CMYK, but not multichannel, index color, or Lab color.
Tech info
- Plugs into: Photoshop CS2 onwards; Elements 6 onwards
- OS: Windows XP onward
- Supported file formats: Major RGB and CMYK formats
- Price level: Approx. $100
XtraSens
XtraSens Ltd. is a privately funded company, focusing on the development of software for image enhancement and speech recognition.
From the same vendor:
- Medical Imaging applications
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