Do you often take photos that have bad contrast, brightness and/or colors? Then when you want to make your albums, you do not know how to improve them? Here comes a solution.
Now jAlbum has an "Auto Correction"-Tool that can be added to jAlbum as a plugin. You can apply auto correction to a whole album or just to single pictures. It will improve the quality of your photos/albums a lot.
Algorithms
1. Auto Contrast:
The goal of auto contrast is to get a correct exposure and to make use of the full contrast spectrum. It uses the luminance histogram.
At first, the brightness is balanced around the center. Afterwards, the contrast is enhanced to make use of the full color spectrum (from dark to bright). Extreme colors that make up less than 0.1% of the image aren't considered.
2. Auto Levels:
Auto Levels uses the same algorithm as Auto Contrast but adjusts each channel from RGB individually.
3. Auto Colors:
The goal of auto Colors is to correct the color tint of images that are either too red, green or blue. The algorithm will only touch images where one or some of the colors are clearly over exposed (cut from the right hand side of a histogram). In such case, the strength of that color is somewhat lowered.
End user usage
You can apply auto correction to individual images from within jAlbum's edit panel. Per default all three algorithms are adjusted to your photo. But it is also possible to just choose one or two if you think that looks better for you image. If "Auto Colors" can't be applied to your photo, it is greyed out.
Skin usage
Skin developers can also use the auto correct filter. The filter implements the JAFilter interface so it behaves like any of jAlbum's classic image filters. Here's a short code sample that shows how a skin can apply auto correction to all images of an album:
import net.jalbum.filters.auto.*;
AutoCorrectionFilter auto = new AutoCorrectionFilter();
auto.setColors(false);
auto.setLevels(false);
engine.addFilter(auto);
Download
T o add the auto correction tool to jAlbum, just download it to your computer, then double click it or drop it onto jAlbum to have it installed.
If you want to see what I really done or improve the ArtyFilters, you can download the source code.