Athentech Technologies Press Release

CALGARY, Alberta, Canada – Athentech® Technologies Inc. (“Athentech”) announced today it has chosen photokina to introduce home, studio and lab versions of its award-winning, patented Perfectly Clear® image correction technology, currently licensed to photo kiosk makers, imaging software developers and other photo, signal processing and digital imaging enterprises around the world. The company also announced that Athentech President Brad Malcolm will be a featured speaker at the “Imaging With Mobile Devices” seminars set for Thursday, 28 September, at the Offenbachsal, Congress Center East, adjacent to photokina.  Malcolm will discuss “Advances in Digital Image Correction” during the morning seminar on “Picture-Taking with Mobile Imaging Devices.”

Morning sessions will examine current and future patterns of use for compact digital cameras and mobile phones with camera functions, according to seminar organizers.

Visitors to Athentech’s photokina exhibit booth (Hall 4.1, Stand C-017) will get a first look at three new Perfectly Clear® software products, designed for use by photo enthusiasts, professional photographers and photo labs, Athentech said.  Perfectly Clear® Enthusiast, Perfectly Clear® Pro and Perfectly Clear® Lab v2.0 are based on the same ground-breaking imaging algorithms previously available only under license to digital imaging manufacturers and software firms, the company said.

“We’re making the smallest, fastest and most visually pleasing image-correction technology available to anyone who takes or makes pictures – whether for fun or for profit,” Malcolm said.  “Athentech’s Perfectly Clear® technology has a strong reputation among our licensees as the best, most effective application for visually pleasing, error-free, color-accurate pictures.  Now those capabilities are within easy reach of every snapshooter, photo enthusiast, pro photographer and commercial imaging business.”

Perfectly Clear® Enthusiast automatically corrects exposure, image depth and sharpness, optimizes color vibrancy, and restores color fidelity – all while eliminating red eye and abnormal tints, and reducing image noise.

Perfectly Clear® Pro is the most advanced, feature-rich 16-bit image correction software on the market, Malcolm said.  Powered by imaging technology that is covered by more than 10 patents and patents pending, it performs all the tasks of the Enthusiast version, plus many others important to the professional photographer.  They include support for more than 75 raw file formats, a special “soft” portrait setting, a vivid color setting, greater noise reduction controls, and image conversion to black & white.

Perfectly Clear® Lab v2.0 is a hot-folder software application that allows for fully automatic, remarkably fast image correction that meets the exacting demands of photo labs, pre-press houses, commercial display fabricators and other imaging professionals.  It offers users several new patented features and capabilities not available in the original version 1.0, Malcolm said.

Additional details on all three of these products will be available at photokina, he said.
Some of the world’s largest imaging companies and leading kiosk software and system manufacturers, who provide both private label units and systems for third parties, have consistently reported an increase in prints made at retail when pictures are corrected with Perfectly Clear®.  A recent retail survey recorded an astounding 300 percent increase in the average number of Perfectly Clear® prints made, compared to similar conditions – time of year, location, pricing, etc. – but without using Athentech’s correction technology.
“This test demonstrated the competitive advantage that Perfectly Clear® provides the retailer,” Malcolm said.  “That same level of effectiveness and satisfaction – as well as the ability to ‘save’ many more images that otherwise would have been lost or unusable – are now available to virtually everybody who’s involved in picture taking through our new family of Perfectly Clear® products.”
About Perfectly Clear®
Because cameras have a single aperture, portions of images captured are commonly improperly exposed.  Some industry data suggest that almost 80 percent of all images captured are underexposed, and 15 percent exhibit red-eye problems.  Perfectly Clear® automatically corrects underexposures, removes abnormal tints, and provides depth, clarity, vibrancy and color correction.  It integrates four leading proprietary third-party technologies:  Full Color Spectrum by Tribeca Imaging Laboratories, Noiseware for noise removal, Foto Nation for red-eye removal, and Bibble for raw file support.
Perfectly Clear®, invented for the digital world, is modeled on the physics principles of light.  Unlike traditional analogue-based approaches that can actually damage true color, create artifacts and cause clipping, Perfectly Clear® is the only solution that operates like the human eye – optimizing and correcting the light in each and every pixel, perfectly preserving the photographer’s memory.  The result is stunning pictures regardless of how they are viewed – electronically or printed on media.  In less than one second, Perfectly Clear® for photographic applications optimizes the lighting in each pixel while maintaining true color with zero clipping and no artifacts.
Perfectly Clear® won the 2005 DIMA Award for Innovative Digital Product of the Year.  Perfectly Clear® is currently installed in more than 23,000 photo kiosks, thousands of minilabs, numerous online photo sites and millions of copies of imaging software in approximately 30 countries around the world.

About Athentech® Technologies Inc.
Athentech® Technologies Inc. is an entrepreneurial, privately held company headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, involved in three different industries and markets:  digital imaging, signal processing (for medical applications) and earth sciences.  Athentech® Imaging, a division of Athentech® Technologies Inc, licenses its Perfectly Clear® image correction software to companies for inclusion in their still and motion/video cameras, x-ray and medical imaging machines, satellites, telescopes, scanners, editing equipment and image manipulation software.  It is now making Perfectly Clear® available to consumers, professional photographers and commercial photo imaging businesses.
For more information, please visit:  http://www.athentech.com.

Athentech and Perfectly Clear are registered trademarks of Athentech Technologies Inc.  Other corporate names and trademarks in this document are the property of their respective companies.