Hi, this is Craig McGowan.  I'm the product marketing manager for EasyShare software.  What that means is that I get to spend my time working with our development team to understand all the cool new features coming out from Kodak research and help explain them to all of our users.  By the way, we just crossed the 20 million mark for EasyShare software users world wide.  There are a lot of you out there!

EasyShare software is Kodak's solution for digital photography on the PC.  It has features for organizing and finding pictures, photo editing, printing (at home and online), sharing (email and online), and creative projects.  It also has features to work with Kodak products like cameras, digital frames, and printers.  Today, I'm going to focus on red-eye editing but check back, I'll be covering many more topics in this blog.

One of the most annoying picture problems is red-eye.  My family is full of blue-eyed people who tend to be prone to big, bright red eyes in pictures.  I'm not very good about going back and setting my camera to red-eye pre-flash so I often end up with lots of red eye pictures.

Here's one of my son from a couple of years ago:

I had lots more like this in my picture collection until we added a nifty new way of reducing red-eye in pictures with EasyShare software.  We took the technology Kodak developed for Kodak Perfect Touch film processing and added to EasyShare software.  The great thing about KPT (as we call it here in Kodak) is that it was designed to work with no operator intervention: it's completely automated.

So when you have a picture with red eye in EasyShare, you can use our editor to remove it automatically.  It finds red spots in the picture and then it uses our proprietary "face detector" to double check that the red eyes are on a face and not red bulbs on a Christmas tree.

The great thing about this is how much time it can save: we find as many red eyes as we can.  I've got one picture with five kids in it and ten red eyes that all got fixed in one click.

Occasionally, we won't find red eye in a picture, so as a backup we also provide manual, click on the red-eye removal.  You just find the red-eye and click on it as shown below.

Our red-eye removal also works great with scanned pictures.  I've been using our new AiO printers to scan in my best pre-digital pictures and its fun to see some of my old pictures again, but this time with out those annoying red eyes!

If you'd like to give EasyShare software a try, you can get it free at www.kodak.com/go/easysharesw