If that endless stream of pretty-much-alike digicams means you're already getting a little bored with digital photography, remember this is still just digital's opening act. If the Vegas oddsmakers were taking bets, the odds would favor the guy betting on ain't seen nothin' yet!"

Take the color purple. Chances are you'd say digicams show purple along with green and red and all the other colors. But the R&D folks at Tribeca Imaging Laboratories in New York say otherwise, and they've got the pictures to prove it.

Not So Deep Purple
If you happen to have any pro photographer customers who'll lose the assignment if they don't do a good job showing the product's exact colors, I'm sure you've heard their distress when the purples keep coming out blue. To get 'em to be real purple, they have to resort to kludges and workarounds. Instead, they could use Tribeca Labs' DCF Full Spectrum plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, just $50 for both Macintosh and Windows. It's based on more than 20,000 images Tribeca captured using dozens of different digital cameras under a wide variety of lighting conditions.

To get techie for a moment, Tribeca found that digicams "all have particular difficulty with greens, blues, indigoes and violets." To remedy the problem, Tribeca's plug-in remaps every color possible in RGB to a more correct color triplet. It works on any image taken by any camera and also has settings that provide the digital equivalent of "Vivid" (bright and snappy) and "Portrait" (soft) color films.

Tribeca's DCF Full Spectrum plug-in could be a good addition to your product mix if you have enough Photoshop users. Check out www.tribecalabs.com for more info. By the way, Tribeca hopes digicam makers will build in DCF in future models. Amazingly, when DCF is put on a chip as "firmware," it needs only 20-40 milliseconds to correct a 5 megapixel image.