The longer you shoot pictures with your digital camera, the sharper your eye will become at analyzing your photos. As it does, you may find yourself spending more time staring at a computer screen than at your camera's LCD. That's because it'll take you more and more time to get your photos just right. When that time arrives, you may want to mull over buying a program like PhotoTune.



The Photoshop plug-in, made by onOne Software, of Portland, Ore., is similar to Optics Pro 4 in that it automates photo corrections. A new edition of the software, version 2.2 released today, incorporates some recent purchases by onOne, 20/20 Color MD 2.0 and SkinTune 2.0.

According to onOne, ColorTune uses a six-step process to correct a photo. It allows a photo editor to do in 15 seconds what could take as much to 10 minutes using the native correction tools in a program like Photoshop.

The SkinTune technology lets an editor fine-tune the flesh tones in a photo based on data libraries developed after more than two years of skin color research. Each library contains between 125,000 and 150,000 colors made up of different combinations of hue, brightness, and saturation, based on racial characteristics.

What's more the technology contains specialized algorithms designed specifically for skin color adjustment. All the adjustments are totally independent. Adjusting brightness, for example, will have no effect on hue or saturation. That's important because a small adjustment can easily knock the skin color for the whole photo out of whack.

PhotoTune 2.2, which works in both OS X and Windows, can be purchased directly from the onOne Web site for $129.95. Users of 20/20 Color MD 1.0 or SkinTune 1.0 can upgrade to PhotoTune 2.2 for $69.95. If you want to test drive the software, a 30-day free trial version of it can be downloaded from the site.