shadow illuminator

(See the original of this picture)

I have been playing with this image enhancement software called Shadow Illuminator. It appears to use a process to automatically raise the levels of shadows “intelligently” in photos. The results appear similar to what you get from various tonemapping algorithms, except much, much better. I have to say I am blown away. I went through my flickrset and found good candidates to run through – you can see the results (including the one above) here, along with links to the originals for comparison.

They have a free online demo right now, for images up to 1.5MB. I’m assuming this is just to drum up publicity for the technology before they close off the online demo and start selling actual software. So, get it while the gettin’s good!