Innovative Irish company gets the red out

Traditionally, photography has been an edit-after-the-fact art form. In the film era, this meant taking lots and lots of pictures and discarding the ones that didn't come out right. Early digital photography has used editing programs like Photoshop to eliminate red-eye or improve lighting after photos have been downloaded to a PC.

An innovative Irish company, FotoNation, has developed technology that allows photo improvement to occur before the picture is actually taken. As profiled in today's Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a compact software program that eliminates red-eye in flash photographs before images are written to disk, among other innovations. Nikon and Kodak are building FotoNation's technology into their digital cameras.

Another interesting point about FotoNation: despite being founded in Galway, Ireland, the founder is Israeli and the chief engineer is Romanian--another example of the growing heterogenizing of Ireland's technology sector.

technology, innovation, software, photography, Wall Street Journal