Enhancing Photos with Perfectly Clear

- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington, and today we're going to be taking a look at a product called Perfectly Clear. It's available in a few different forms, from a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom, to a standalone application, as well as something you could run on a phone or tablet. Now the core technology is all the same. What's really at play here is a group of software tools that are fairly automated. You see Perfectly Clear began its life as software that is used in photo labs. Many photos, in fact about 30 million photos a day are printed using the software at all sorts of different professional labs.

So if you submit your photos to an online lab for printing, chances are it's actually gone through this software. Well now the software is available to the end consumer, so if you wanna do your own prints, or your going directly to sharing online, or you just wanna get things under control before you print or send it off to print you can actually use the same technology now. The way that it works is essentially an auto-image analysis. It's a pretty straightforward process. When you run the plugin or load an image into the app or standalone software, it'll simply analyze the image, then, by choosing a series of presets, you can apply a recipe that's gonna be well suited to a particular image problem.

Now like all software, there tends to be controls, so if you need to refine things, you'll find sliders, and other things that are quite useful to dial in exactly the image that you want. But the true magic is allowing the tool to do its auto-analysis and make the recommended fixes. In fact this can dramatically speed up the workflow. One potential use of this is to use it to batch process photos say from a portrait shoot, or an interior shoot or a product shoot, where you've got similar images. This will allow you to quickly go through and auto-fix all of those and then send a first copy over to a client for review.

So whether you're a professional looking to speed up your workflow or an amateur just looking to save time or do less work inside of an image editing app, Perfectly Clear can be quite useful. So today we're gonna explore all of the different applications from running inside of Adobe software to using as a standalone app to putting it on your phone. And you'll see how you can use the same controls and underlying technology to quickly improve just about any image.