Digital ROC™ and Digital SHO™ from Applied Science Fiction™

PSA Journal, June, 2003 by Stanley Ashbrook

According to Applied Science Fiction, the company that developed the products, Digital ROC automatically restores color quality to digital images by removing the colorcast from faded images and effects of tungsten and fluorescent lighting.

Digital SHO automatically reveals details hidden in shadows commonly caused by exposure problems such as backlit subjects, uneven flash illumination and partial shade.

Both of these products are software plug-ins that work in Photoshop[R], but they may also work with other Photoshop plug-in compatible applications such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 or 2.0; Adobe PhotoDeluxe[R] Home Edition 4.0, Adobe Photoshop LE 5.0; or Jasc[R] Paint Shop Pro[R] 7.

I had heard about these products and in fact was given a demo CD to try out, but having worked with Photoshop for a number of years and becoming fairly proficient with its capability, I've been skeptical about using anything that says "auto." I want the control over the image that you don't have by clicking on Auto. Therefore I didn't do anything with the CD until, somewhere, I saw a before-and-after image that used ROC. This looked impressive and so I decided to give it a try. All I can say is WOW!

I have a bunch of slides taken in the 50's using old Ektachrome and they have all lost their color due to the unstable dyes used at the time. Not wanting to throw away these gems from the past, I figured I could bring them back using Photoshop. I tried and tried but was never completely satisfied with the result, until I used ROC. I opened an image of my eldest son (now 44 years old), taken on his first Christmas in 1958. After the products were installed, in the Filter menu, I selected ROC from the Applied Science Fiction group and I got the dialog box shown in Figure 1. From this dialog I knew I was on to something. I accepted the defaults and Figure 2 is the result. Again, "wow" was my comment. Using the Rubber Stamp tool, Levels, and Hue/ Saturation, I was able to bring the image back to almost perfect color. In the dialog box there are some color controls and a magnifier if you want to depart from the default settings. They give you some control over the result.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

I then tried additional troublesome images. Figure 3 is of Bev, my wife, on our honeymoon in 1957. Bev's face was in the shadows and here is where I first tried the other product, Digital SHO, to open these shadows.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Digital SHO is great for opening up shadows and reducing the contrast of an image. Although this product is not as spectacular as ROC, I've found it very useful. An experienced Photoshop user could, with a little effort, duplicate the results of SHO, but not in the time it takes to run SHO. I also found that, while it did a very good job in bringing our shadow detail, the whole scene also was a little lighter. See the dialog box for SHO, Figure 4.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

I use a couple of techniques to get around this. For a small area such as Bev's face, after I applied the SHO filter, I went to the History Palette. I selected and made active the state just prior to the SHO state and set the History brush flag to the SHO state. The History brush will paint from the state that is set with the flag so with the History brush I then was able to paint in where I wanted to bring out shadow detail.

For Figure 5, before applying the filter, I copied the background to a new layer and applied the SHO filter to this layer. I then applied a Layer Mask to this layer by selecting Layer > Add Layer Mask > Hide All. I then painted on the mask with black where I want the filter applied.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Both of these filters are a must-have as far as I'm concerned. They are available from Applied Science Fiction[TM], the developer of Digital ICE[TM] and Digital IC[E.sup.3][TM], the spot and scratch removing software that comes with some transparency/ negative scanners. In fact Digital ICE3 incorporates Digital ROC, so you may already have it if you own a Nikon scanner. You can download a demo of each from their website at www.asf.com. The demo will let you use the product, but will overprint the result with their name. If you then decide to purchase, you can buy online and they will e-mail you a code to make it work without the overprint. The price of each is $49.95.

Any mention of products or services in this article or anywhere else in the PSA Journal does not constitute an endorsement or approval of those items.