Auto photo correction

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Amateur digital photographers may soon have a reason to rejoice.

That's because a New York company known as Tribeca Labs has built an application called PhotoBot, which is designed to take most of the guesswork out of making even mundane digital photos look good.

The idea behind PhotoBot, which was unveiled at Demofall here Tuesday, is that it can automatically correct lighting, red-eye and contrast problems in photos. And Tribeca Labs insists that when it says "automatically," it means it.

In other words, users' photos are autocorrected by PhotoBot, which runs in the background and thus works without users clicking even once.

Further, the software can automatically save all of users' photos to a secure storage bank in Switzerland, for a $5-a-month fee. The company is banking that providing storage in facilities used by Swiss banks will help users feel that their thousands of photos will always be safe, regardless of what happens to the media they normally use to save photos, or even regardless of what computers they use. Ideally, their photos would stay safe in perpetuity on Tribeca Labs' servers in Switzerland.

Of course, this begs the question of what happens to users' photos if Tribeca Labs goes out of business.

Also, because PhotoBot runs full-time in a user's computer's background, it means that there will be some hit on performance. And that is something that Tribeca will have to ensure does not become a problem.

Besides that, however, the software seems like a good idea, since it could well help users produce good-looking photos without having to worry about the settings on their cameras.

Of course, no software can help an amateur photographer choose which pictures are in good taste.