Eastman Kodak Company

Kodak Introduces New DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In

Free Trial version of the DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In is now available at www.asf.com

Rochester, NY, Jun 02 -- Eastman Kodak Company today introduced the new DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In, which gives users a quick and powerful way of smoothing skin and other surfaces without blurring or affecting the detail of important facial features.  This new plug-in enables users to automatically achieve meticulous airbrush and retouching effects without tedious, time-consuming masking and manual softening.

The DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In joins the suite of image correction and enhancement plug-ins that provide easy and effective methods for automatically improving digital images in ADOBE PHOTOSHOP Software and compatible image editing applications. Other plug-ins include the DIGITAL SHO Plug-In for revealing hidden details in shadows or dark image areas, and the DIGITAL SHO Professional Plug-In, which adds more control, functionality, and the ability to reveal hidden detail from highlight areas. The DIGITAL ROC Plug-In restores, corrects, and balances image color, while the DIGITAL ROC Professional Plug-In adds advanced features for brightness and contrast control, as well as 16 bit support. Finally, the original DIGITAL GEM Plug-In reduces distracting noise and grain in digital images.

 These award-winning software products were developed by Kodak’s Austin Development Center (formerly Applied Science Fiction), which has been a leader in automatic image correction and photo restoration applications since the mid 1990s.  The Kodak Austin Development Center created the revolutionary DIGITAL ICE Technology for film and flatbed scanners which automatically removes surface defects like dust and scratches from scanned film and prints.

The DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In smoothes and purifies the texture of surfaces in digital images by reducing harsh shadows and highlights.  This minimizes the imperfections of skin and other surfaces, while fully preserving significant details like hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows.  Several advanced control sliders allow users to customize the smoothing effects and intensity amounts at three levels of detail: fine, medium, and coarse. Users can preview a high contrast mask which depicts the image detail that is affected and unaffected. The plug-in provides three standard setting buttons: Normal; Lighten; and Darken, which allow the correction to be applied to only darker areas, only lighter areas, or both. The DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In also supports the use of 16 bit color images, as well as the standard 8 bit color images.

“The DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In provides a quick, effective, and affordable solution for the amateur snap-shooter or the professional portrait/wedding photographer to bring out the real beauty in their subjects,” said Dan Sullivan, General Manager, Kodak’s Austin Development Center. “Whether the subjects are older with wrinkles, teens with blemishes, or toddlers with already perfect skin, this plug-in will make them look their best, automatically.”

A FREE trial version is available for download at www.asf.com. This fully functional trial version applies digital watermarks to images. To disable the watermark, users may purchase a software key via a secure, e-commerce site for $99.95. Plug-in product CD-ROMs are also available for purchase at www.asf.com. 

About Eastman Kodak Company and infoimaging

Kodak is the leader in helping people take, share, print and view images – for memories, for information, for entertainment.  The company is a major participant in infoimaging, a $385 billion industry composed of devices (digital cameras and flat-panel displays), infrastructure (online networks and delivery systems for images) and services & media (software, film and paper enabling people to access, analyze and print images).  With sales of $13.3 billion in 2003, the company comprises several businesses: Health, supplying the healthcare industry with traditional and digital image capture and output products and services; Graphic Communications Group, offering on-demand color printing and networking publishing systems consisting of three wholly owned subsidiaries:  Encad, Inc., NexPress Solutions, and Kodak Versamark; Commercial Imaging, offering image capture, output and storage products and services to businesses and government; Display & Components, which designs and manufactures state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode displays as well as other specialty materials, and delivers optics and imaging sensors to original equipment manufacturers; and Digital & Film Imaging Systems, providing consumers, professionals and cinematographers with digital and traditional products and services.

KODAK, DIGITAL ICE, DIGITAL GEM, DIGITAL ROC, and DIGITAL SHO are trademarks of Eastman Kodak Company. All other trade names, trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

2004