July 27, 2001 For Immediate Release Contact: Roland Lee Vice President, Marketing Shapiro Consulting Group, Inc. (888) 800-5508 Asiva Photo Lets You Enhance Images Without Making Masks A revolutionary digital image color correction and enhancement application is due to be released by Shapiro Consulting Group, inc. (SCGI), of Austin, Texas. Called Asiva® Photo, the new Macintosh software will allow photographers and graphic artists to make color corrections and enhancements that are close to impossible using currently available software. " Asiva photo lets the artist apply enhancements in three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional image. This means that very fine gradations of corrections can be made only where they are needed," says SCGI Chief Technology Officer Kevin Gordon. "Changing the color of fine detail, such as hair, is also nearly impossible with applications that require a mask. At the very least, creating that mask would take many hours, and the result still wouldn't look natural. With Asiva, it's easy and the result is a photo that looks completely natural." The same technology also lets the artist soften and sharpen objects, increase saturation, brighten or darken areas and create special effect in ways previously impossible. " Our website, which will be available in August, includes examples of the results that Asiva Photo can achieve," says Roland Lee, Vice President of Marketing for SCGI. "One example is a woodland scene. We changed the colors from spring to fall. If you had to change each leaf individually, you couldn't justify the time. We're talking days. But, with Asiva, we did it in less than fifteen minutes. Visitors to our website are going to be surprised at what Asiva can do," Lee adds. Asiva also saves time in other ways. Instead of rendering the entire, high-resolution image with each change, Asiva uses a lower-resolution representation that let's the artist see changes almost immediately. " If you've ever worked with a large file, you know small changes can take a long time to render in other applications. You could go to lunch during the time it takes for some changes. With Asiva, most changes are viewed in seconds, not minutes," says Lee. Asiva uses Apple ColorSync to ensure that colors remain consistent from input device to monitor to output device. If the device parameters are in the ColorSync system, what you see on the screen is what you see in the output. " Our development for Asiva Photo is on schedule and we expect to make our August 24th release date," says Gordon. For further information, p[lease contact Roland Lee at 1-888-800-5508.