It has been a long sabbatical since introducing Saturday Software Reviews, but the good thing is that we are back and we have got a new software for you today: PhotoAcute Mobile by Almalence.
PhotoAcute, What?
PhotoAcute Mobile processes batches of continuous pictures in order to produce a larger sized and noise reduced picture. In human words: if you are some place where you can’t get a clear shot, you can launch the continuous mode in your camera phone then use PhotoAcute to deliver a proper higher-quality photo out of the 6 low-quality continuous photos. Jump after the break for the review and a neat surprise!
How?
PhotoAcute Mobile automatically detects groups of continuous photos. It gives you the option to process these images, edit the group (to remove or add images) and even create your own group of pictures from the gallery. In the settings pane, you can choose JPEG quality, brightness and geometry correction for the corners, as well as the drive on which the processed image will be saved. After picking the image group and finishing the settings, you can Start Processing. Quite easy.
In Real-Life
In order to test PhotoAcute, I chose the worst time ever to take a night picture and the worst night camera ever: there was an electricity blackout and my room was lit by a white neon and I used the 3250 which has a 2MP cam, no autofocus and no flash. I put the 3250 on a table and set the camera to continuous mode, which gave me 6 pictures of the worst quality. You can’t imagine how much noise the pictures had. I launched PhotoAcute and processed the images. Result: one of the original photos on the left (all look the same) and processed photo on the right, I also zoomed and cropped one part of the image to show you the details. Click on the images for larger view.
In one word: wow, great result. I wasn’t expecting it. The noise, aka the granulations you see in the lower left image are reduced by more than 80% I would say, the overall image is crisper and nicer to look at. I am impressed.
The only problem is that in order to obtain this kind of result, your device has to be absolutely steady because PhotoAcute places all images on top of each other in order to reduce the noise. That means that you either have to place your device on a table, either use a tripod to capture images.
But there is one nice use for this application. Let’s say you take continuous pictures of a moving object. Process them and you’ll have one image in which all positions of the object are shown in a semi-transparent way, like a nice motion photoshop’ed image.
WishList
My only wish for PhotoAcute Mobile now is for them to introduce some sort of pattern recognizing so you could obtain the same high-quality effect even if your device wasn’t perfectly steady, which would allow to use the software for pictures taken when the device is held with your hands for example.
Talk Money and Availability
PhotoAcute Mobile has a trial version limited to 30-photo processes and all being tagged by the logo. You can also buy a license for 16$.
But we have got a surprise for our readers. Almalence are offering 3 free licenses for you. All you have to do is post a comment about how you would use PhotoAcute, what you like about it or what you would want to see improved. Deadline is Wednesday January 16 at 18:00 GMT. Winners will be randomly picked in the following hours/day.
I’d like to see the ability to automatically stitch photos together. PhotoShop introduced this feature recently, and that’s nice, but we don’t all have the cash for that sort of software.
By the way I tried clicking on your sample images to view the larer originals, but they don’t appear to have active links on them.
Forgot to explain better – what if I want to take a panorama, say of the Golden Gate Bridge. We’ve all tried to take several photos and stitch them together as a panorama, but it’s tough – not least becuase we never line the pictures up so well, and there are usually remarkable colour differences between the pictures.
I’d like to use it to see if it would make a HDR photo (take a pic with low ev, mid ev, and high ev) Since i have an N95 I have access to a bit more camera-riffic features.
Something I’d see if they could do is just as you said, use some kinda image mapping to get a rough estimate where each picture is so it could smartly adapt them when combining them.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high-dynamic-range.htm
Wow !!! , This program will solve all my problems :) , I have a Nokia 3250 and night shots is a nightmare :(
Installed their demo version on my N95-1 and N95-2, and I get the same error on both. When I try have a group of photos ready, I click “Start Processing” and it gives me an error. Something along the lines of “Error can’t start processing. Error: -04″ or something… oh well.
What a great idea for a Symbian app! I too would like it to have some pattern recognition so that it could match the individual photographs without requiring such a perfect alignment between them. It would definitely make my E65′s crappy camera work as a real camera!
Steve there’s Panoman for that purpose, stitiching photos together I mean.
Dinan, unfortunately I only tried it on my 3250 for which I have a license. So I can’t pretty much say how it works on an N95.
Can’t wait to try this out on my E61. :-)
yeah i’ve got a n95-3 and get the same error. maybe the program doesn’t like the size of 5mp images ;P
Sounds great.
I’d like to use it for some photography of the night sky where image stacking is often used to bring out faint images (see http://www.astrostack.com/). For image stacking you need to *add* the pixels in the images together rather than filter, such as selecting the median values (which I suspect is similar to what it currently does).
Another useful feature (essential for image stacking) is the ability to subtract a ‘dark frame’ from the photos before processing. A dark frame is a long exposure photo taken in pitch black, e.g. with the lens over on. Then bias in the individual CCD elements show up. Subtracting the dark from from the individual frames can improve long exposure photos greatly.
These features would be great for me – a complete mobile astrophotography lab in my pocket.
Lovely software..
I'd like to use it to see if it would make a HDR photo (take a pic with low ev, mid ev, and high ev) Since i have an N95 I have access to a bit more camera-riffic features.
Something I'd see if they could do is just as you said, use some kinda image mapping to get a rough estimate where each picture is so it could smartly adapt them when combining them.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/high...