Athentech’s Latest Round of Licensing Agreements Extends Reach Of its Award-Winning Perfectly Clear® Image-Correction Technology

PhotoWorks, Albumprinter, five others worldwide select world’s only Real Color solution

CALGARY, Alberta (27 December, 2007) – In a new round of licensing agreements for the integration of its award-winning Perfectly Clear® automatic image correction technology into a variety of photo systems, Athentech® Technologies Inc. has signed contracts with PhotoWorks and Digilabs in the U.S., Fotokasten in Germany, River Co. in Poland, and Albumprinter, Arcadia Software and Pixilu Imaging worldwide, that further establish Perfectly Clear® as the world’s leading automatic turnkey image-correction solution, the company announced today.

Athentech will be exhibiting at the Photo Marketing Association trade show, 31 Jan.-2 Feb. at the Las Vegas Convention Center, in Technology Suite X141. Interested parties can find out more about Perfectly Clear®, which has quickly become an industry standard for automatic image correction, as well as “demo” the latest version of Athentech’s productive lab application – Perfectly Clear® Labs v3.0, the company said. Joining the list of Perfectly Clear® licensees that already includes Bibble, Digital Portal, DuNord, Express Imaging, FixFoto, Janna Systems, Lucidiom, muvee Technologies, Pixology (Photochannel), Simple Star, KIS/Photo-Me Group, Oblo, Photobot, PixPert, Worksunit, SeeFile Software and a host of retailers around the world are:

• PhotoWorks, the Seattle-based online photo community and personal publishing company, which is using Perfectly Clear® to correct its customers’ pictures before incorporating them into keepsake mugs, themed photo books, personalized calendars and other popular consumer products
• Fotokasten, the popular German online photo service, which is using Perfectly Clear® to correct its customers’ pictures before incorporating them into a variety of consumer products
• Albumprinter, based in the Netherlands, which has incorporated Perfectly Clear® into its photo book software for creating quality consumer picture books
• Digilabs, the Palo Alto, Calif., consumer software developer, which also has incorporated Perfectly Clear® into its picture book, calendar and card creation software, allowing its customers to automatically correct their photos
• Pixilu Imaging of Columbus, Ohio, which is incorporating Perfectly Clear® into its popular digital photo retouching services
• Arcadia Software of Cologne, Germany, which has incorporated Perfectly Clear® into its oneclick, image-optimizing PhotoPerfect professional photo editor software
• River Co., the Polish kiosk developer, which has incorporated Perfectly Clear® into its product line

“We’re very pleased that the reputation of Perfectly Clear® as the fastest, most effective automatic imagecorrection application for visually pleasing, error-free, color-accurate pictures continues to attract a growing list of quality imaging partners, retailers and licensees,” said Athentech President Brad Malcolm.

“We make the smallest, most visually pleasing and accurate image-correction technology available to anyone who takes or makes pictures – whether for fun or for profit. More and more companies and their customers are benefiting from the automatic capabilities of our multi-patented Perfectly Clear® solution.” At PMA, Athentech is launching its new Perfectly Clear® Lab v3.0, 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. Perfectly Clear® Labs v3.0 offers several powerful new features, such as the fully automatic correction of .pdf files (that include imbedded photos), said Malcolm, who is scheduling appointments at the Athentech booth to speak with the press and other interested parties. (Malcolm’s contact information is at the top of this press release.) Perfectly Clear® image-correction technology has quickly become an industry standard for quality turnkey image correction. In addition to its integration into a variety of imaging software products, online fulfillment houses and editing systems, at last count Athentech Technologies’ image-correction technology had been installed in more than 44,000 retail photo kiosks and several thousand minilabs in more than 30 countries, according to the company.

How Perfectly Clear® Works
Because cameras have a single aperture, images captured are commonly improperly exposed. Some industry data suggest that almost 80 percent of images captured are underexposed, and 15 percent exhibit red-eye problems. Perfectly Clear® automatically corrects underexposures, removes abnormal tints, and provides depth (contrast), clarity (sharpening), color vibrancy and skin tone correction. It integrates three leading proprietary third-party technologies: Full Spectrum RGB by Tribeca Imaging, Noiseware for noise removal, and FotoNation for red-eye removal.

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 as prints. 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®’s Real Color correction differentiates it from all other image-correction technologies, according to the company. It is the only correction technology that accurately corrects photos to perfectly preserve the customer’s memories, Malcolm said. Digital capture devices, he continued, currently are incapable of reproducing the full spectrum of colors that the eye sees. “Perfectly Clear® optimizes the exposure for every pixel in the image, abiding by the physics principles of light, ensuring that customers’ precious photo memories are accurately corrected and perfectly preserved forever,” he said.