Make Your Pictures Look Better Without Lifting a Finger?

Imagine a software program that could look at all your digital images and make them better without your having to make a single decision. That's the promise behind Photobot, an ambitious new software program that's in beta now and about to be released.

I played with Photobot over the last two days, and while it works to a certain degree, the old adage "if it sounds too good to be true it probably is too good to be true" holds true.

Nothing could be simpler. Photobot installs easily enough, and all you do is tell it which directory to look in to find your photos. As advertised, it does the rest—every single bit of it. It automatically performs a pixel-by-pixel analysis, and basically does three things to your images:

• It corrects for exposure problems;
• It applies some color corrections, especially on large areas like sky and water; and
• It removes red-eye automatically.

To do this, the program leaves your original image intact and creates a copy. Then, without asking you a thing, it works its magic on the copy. You don't get to do a side-by-side comparison. The problem with this approach is twofold. One, I'm doubling the size of my photo collection immediately. (Yes, I know storage is cheap, but still.) Two, I found that in about half the cases, I liked my original photo better. The new, improved Photobot-ed pictures were too bright, often washing out things like my fall foliage.

Photobot goes hand in hand with a web companion site to archive your photos called Swiss Picture Bank. The site is still being completed, but the company says it will archive your photos at Swisscom IT's data centers—the same systems that handle the Swiss Bank.

I called Tribeca Labs, creators of the software, to explain why I was a bit dubious about automating my photo corrections. They explained that the software was strictly for the point-and-shoot crowd who would never do any digital imaging, and they clearly have a lot of expertise in professional digital imaging. Still, I wasn't convinced.

Other imaging programs like Picasa and Adobe Elements also have "just make my photo look better" quick-fix buttons, but you can see the results on screen and decide then and there whether you like it better in its original form. The fact that Photobot doesn't give you the choice, and then makes you go through the Windows file system to revert back to your original photo gives me pause. The concept of a photo robot is awesome, but this one gets a wait and see for now.