Inside Snapfish Lab

7 automatic improvements to your photos -- for free

2008-07-10T00:05:00Z

Jamie Beckett at HP Labs has a blog entry on one of the Snapfish Lab tools which automatically applies seven proprietary enhancement algorithms to improve your photograph. See Jamie's article for more information.

Traffic is building at Snapfish Lab

2008-06-03T21:38:00Z

We are very happy that a significant number of you are beginning to discover Snapfish Lab. Over the last few weeks we have seen a steady increase your visits, both those of you casually stopping by and those of you registering with your Snapfish account so you can try out the tools with your own photographs. Welcome to you all!

We would love to hear from you about how you came upon Snapfish Lab, whether it was what you expected, and if you found it interesting or useful.

We've all taken pictures like this

2008-04-22T20:55:00Z

It looked good in the viewfinder... but when you get the photograph uploaded onto your PC, you wonder why your head was tilted when you snapped the picture.

We have an application on the Snapfish Lab site that can fix this! Once you have uploaded your photo to Snapfish, you can run the Automatic Horizon Alignment application to automatically undo the actions of your tiled head. Check it out!

Open for business!

2008-04-14T17:11:00Z

One of the earlier blog posts mentioned the need for an invitation code to use the site. Now that we can handle more users on the system, we've removed the need for the code, so anyone with a Snapfish account and log in and try the tools on their own photos (just leave the invitation code field blank).

In other exciting news...

There is a good article by Simon Firth on the HP Labs web site on Snapfish Lab. It provides more context about why we've created this site. We'd appreciate any feedback you have on it.

Also, we pushed out a new release of the software over the weekend. You should notice much better performance on the various photo enhancement applications. You should also be able to upload finished posters back to Snapfish much more quickly in the Poster Creator application.

Previously, the various photo enhancement operations were being run on full size images (suitable for printing) and thus were a bit slow. This new version performs the operations on reduced resolution images, and only does the full sized one if needed.

Creating a photo collage poster

2008-04-11T07:34:00Z

Yes, I am biased... But I really do think we have one of the better online tools for making a photo collage on Snapfish Lab. Anyway I did a quick Google search and didn't run across anything I'd rather use.

A caveat - I didn't download any of the PC softwares to try. About a year ago I went looking for a free PC app to create collages and found what seemed to be a decent one (after not finding any online ones). I then spent about an hour making a family collage, only to be told, when I tried to save my masterpiece, that it would cost me $29.99 to do so! Agh!!! Of course they don't tell you this up front! And no, I didn't pay. I got disgusted at this tactic and deleted the whole thing and don't go through the trouble of downloading and installing PC apps anymore...

The Poster Creator tool we have on Snapfish Lab is absolutely free. No ads, shareware payments, or any hidden fees. You do need a Snapfish account - it's called 'Snapfish' Lab after all - and we would appreciate a note letting us know whether you liked it or not from time to time. I think the Snapfish people would appreciate printing the poster through their service, too, but it's not required. We're doing this really just to get the user feedback.

Why do I like the Snapfish Lab photo collage tool over others? Many of the photo collage tools out there lay the photos out in a grid pattern like a cookie dough in a pan or a sheet of stamps. Ugh. Then there are others that have templates for a fixed number of photos. Those are okay, but most of the time I don't have those exact numbers. Plus I really a layout unique to my set of photos, not generic ones that a few thousand people out there also have.

The engine that Brian created powering Poster Creator is smarter than that. It can take an arbitrary number of photos and generate half a dozen or so layouts for you to choose from. You can end the process there and have a pretty nice photo collage. Or if you like to tweak things and optimize to the nth degree like me, you can go through and swap photos in the layout, do minor editing, etc. It's a lot of fun. I created my Christmas card last year this way.

Here is an example of a collage from the Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Try creating your photo collage with the Poster Creator here!

Oh, and if you have a photo collage tool you like, please post a comment here. We'd sure like to hear about it!

Experience Zone

2008-04-09T05:29:00Z

HP Labs held a press event in Palo Alto a month ago on March 6 to talk about our new organization and the focus on fewer, larger impact projects. Part of the day was a demonstration event called Experience Zone - an opportunity for the reporters and analysts to view and interact with HP Labs research in a simulated real-world environment. Snapfish Lab was one of the 16 demonstrations in this event - being situated in a home/office type environment.

Our main demonstration was the poster creator application. We set up three laptops to allow folks to get some hands-on experience with creating posters. We also created a special build of the software to allow the poster to be printed at a local printer, so our demo visitors can take their new creations home with them!

I took a few photos for this event, so I thought I'd share them in a photoblog type format for this entry...

This was actually taken the day before, on March 5, the set up day. This is back in the office with (starting at the left) Peng, Eamonn, and Brian with all the equipment loaded on the cart ready to take down to the Building 20 auditorium where the event is held.

Also on set-up day... Peng and Eamonn hard at work getting the server configured for the demo.

Here are Brian, Eamonn, and Peng during the event explaining Snapfish Lab to our many visitors.

Our CEO Mark Hurd gave an opening remark to kick off the event for the reporters and analysts. Between the end of his remarks and when they opened up the exhibits to the visitors, Mark came by for a brief tour of Experience Zone. He stopped by our area and Peng gave him a quick 30 second whirlwind tour of Snapfish Lab...

It's opening day at Snapfish Lab.

2008-01-30T17:14:00Z

We here in the Snapfish Labs team at HP Labs excited that today our first big group of people to start using the site.

Welcome to you all!

Our servers are provisioned, our networks are configured, our software is deployed -- now we just wait and watch an hope that everything works fine for everyone.

Please let us know what you think, and of any improvement we could make.

(To use your own photos on the the site you will need an account with Snapfish and, while we are in private beta, an invitation code from us. As a special for blog readers here is an invitation code that will work until January 31: BLG4366 )

__
Eamonn

What’s a ‘Snapfish Lab’?

2008-01-30T16:19:00Z

I own a Canon digital SLR and four digital point and shoots of various brands. I read dpreviews religiously. I almost never leave the house without a camera, not counting the one built into my cell phone. I also have an adorable 21 month old daughter. If you guess that I take lots of photos each week (each day, really), you'd be right.

Now, I'm NOT an amateur photographer. I don't have an artsie bone in my body and I have no idea how to take the kind of artistic photos that people display proudly on their web pages. My photos are simply snapshots. I just want to capture the special moments with my family, especially the baby, or friends, and be able to share them with other folks, either online or physically through Christmas cards, prints, albums, posters, and so forth. Oh, and maybe have them printed on knick-knacks like mugs and shirts.

To be honest, most of my photos can use some editing. One of my biggest faults is that I don't focus in on the subject as much as the photography books say that I should. Partly because it's hard to stay zoomed into an extremely mobile toddler, but part of it is that I tell myself with so many megapixels, I can always crop out the excess later. Better to have extra stuff in the photo then to lose something I may want later. But with so many photos coming out of the camera, I don't really ever get around to editing any of them - unless I need one for a special occasion like a card or something.

I can could use some help creating cool stuff out of these photos. Two winters ago, I wanted to send out a photo collage with our family Christmas newsletter, because I couldn't decide which *one* of my thousands of photos to make a photocard with. I didn't want a collage that was a boring rectangular grid, but something that looked more artistic to impress my friends, though I wasn't motivated enough to actually go buy a collage software. :) I looked on the web and didnt see any good free ones - so I tried making one myself in Microsoft Office. Boy, was that a mistake. About five hours later, I ended up with a rectangular 2x4 grid of photos and called it quits...

I'm a R&D project manager here at HP Labs, and I work with a bunch of smart researchers who work on some pretty neat technologies to make it easier to work with digital media like photos and videos. We thought it'd be cool to share some of this work with the world, so we created this site called Snapfish Lab. This is a technology demo site where you can see some of the research being done here at HP Labs, and at the same time you can use some of these tools on the photos in your Snapfish account - thus the name 'Snapfish Lab'.

We're launching Snapfish Lab with six initial tools, and we'll be updating the site periodically with new tools. There's some neat stuff to check out. I've been using the horizon alignment tool to fix those crooked landscapes that I seem to have a talent for taking, and last Christmas, the graphics for my family Christmas photocard was made by the same Poster Creator tool you see on this site.

Now, some caveats... The tools on Snapfish Lab are early peeks of research & development efforts - meaning that they are quite not ready for prime time. To you, the user, that means that you may experience annoyances from time to time - thus the 'Beta' next to our logo. So please excuse the faults, though we would very much like to hear about them so we can work on improving them. On the bright side, we don't have any annoying ads on the site. :) And the Snapfish Lab site is *not* the same as the regular Snapfish site - any annoyances you see on this site are our responsibilities and has nothing to do with the good folks at Snapfish or the fabulous service that they run.

So please give the site a spin at http://www.snapfishlab.com. Let us know what you like or don't like. Or if you have ideas for some tool that can scratch that photo itch you've always had, let us know! We'll see what we can do. :)

Thanks and till next time.

Jerry