Business Week

Applied Science Fiction


MAKING THOSE OLD SNAPSHOTS LOOK NEW AGAIN Color pictures show their age, as anyone with a shoebox full of old prints can tell you. Using scanners, image-conscious digerati can load these pictures into a computer and touch them up with tools such as Adobe Photoshop. But even for a whiz in Photoshop, a mountain of pictures makes a daunting project. Applied Science Fiction, a digital imaging startup in Austin, Tex., says it has a simpler solution, called Digital ROC, for ''reconstruction of color.'' It's a program that photo-equipment manufacturers can install in scanners, enabling them to analyze the red, green, and blue layers		of a photo, find buried clues about the original color, and display the results on a computer screen. Digital ROC is the latest in a suite of ASF products aimed at scanner and copier makers. The first in the suite, called Digital ICE (image correction and enhancement), zaps dust, scratches, and fingerprints from both surfaces of scanned slides without changing the underlying image. Eastman Kodak Co. (EK) and Nikon Corp have designed ICE into high-end scanners aimed at professional design studios and photo labs. But with hundreds of billions of images now stored in photo agencies, file cabinets, and shoe boxes, there may also be a huge consumer market.

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