How SoftOrbits' Image Data Restoration and Photo Retouching Toolkit Preserves Memories

How SoftOrbits' image data restoration and photo retouching toolkit preserves memories

SoftOrbits was founded in 2006 by software development expert Eugene Ustinenkov. Humbly beginning as a small image data processing startup, nowadays SoftOrbits has grown into one of the leading niche companies, recognized by OISV, Softonic, and CNET among other industry leaders.

Boasting more than 1,000,000 yearly downloads and servicing 300,000 users, SoftOrbits mostly focuses on developing feature-focused utilities that help amateur and professional photographers remove the daily hassle and automate tedious tasks. However, some of the most successful products SoftOrbits released are actually tools that help users restore damaged files and retouch old photographs, preserving memories for thousands of people from over 200 countries.

"We always say that photography is all about capturing a moment in time – and, in a way, time itself. That's why losing all of the precious moments you've collected through the years due to hardware malfunction or photo degradation feels so unfair. We have experienced it ourselves, which is why Picture Doctor was one of our first utilities," says Eugene Ustinenkov, CEO of SoftOrbits with over 10 years of software development experience.

How Picture Doctor, Photo Retoucher, and Flash Drive Recovery restore photographs once thought to be lost forever

One of SoftOrbits' earliest products, Picture Doctor embodies simplicity, user-friendliness, and effectiveness. It is a small-weight tool designed to quickly and reliably repair damaged JPEG and PSD files to ensure no one's work or memory is lost. Picture Doctor uses improved algorithms for repairing files, allows repairing photos in batch mode, and can reproduce objects with original parameters, including palette and dimensions, as well as restore layers in Adobe Photoshop files.

"Picture Doctor has significantly influenced our general design philosophy – we aim to provide the most intuitive and straightforward tools in our niche because there is already an overabundance of complex software that promises to provide every single feature imaginable. We don't want our users to read long manuals or watch tutorials. We want them to download the tool and get their desired results in a matter of seconds," says Eugene Ustinenkov, CEO of SoftOrbits, Candidate of Technical Sciences.

Flash Drive Recovery, another utility from SoftOrbits' toolkit, helps users restore their media files from damaged flash drives, USB drives, digital cameras, or PC cards, making it incredibly useful for any kind of hardware issue. The tool offers a quick and deep scan feature, can be used to recover files from compact and Micro SD files, and supports drives from Samsung, Patriot, Kingston, SanDisk, Verbatim, Lexar, PNY, and more.

"We always recommend that users create backups of their photos and projects in cloud storage, but a lot of the images the tool recovers were actually made and saved long before cloud storage became popular and widespread. Even today we still rely on hardware, and it occasionally breaks, so the tool surprisingly never lost its significance over the years," says Eugene.

SoftOrbits Photo Retoucher is another tool that helps with saving memories, although in a different way. This tool enables users to fix their photographs that have degraded over time, helping eliminate spots and dust, fix scratched backgrounds, and reduce graininess and digital noise. However, that's not the full extent of its capabilities. Photo Retoucher also allows users to convert black and white photos to color, remove objects, and retouch portraits by hiding wrinkles, adding makeup, or fixing eye color.

"We're especially proud of our retouch software because we regularly get a lot of positive feedback and stories from customers who were able to connect with their family history in a way they couldn't before. This is invaluable, and I find it difficult to express just how much this motivates us to develop more software and provide new features in the future," says Eugene Ustinenkov, CEO of SoftOrbits and AlarmFront.

What the future holds: SaaS and AI

While the team is focused on helping customers restore their memories, it is by no means stuck in the past. This year, SoftOrbits introduced new AI features to seven of its utilities and is focused on finding new ways to implement the technology. Not only that, the team is also planning to change its distribution model to SaaS to increase the accessibility of its services and remove hardware limitations.

"SaaS is one of our priorities right now, so it is only a matter of time before we switch to it fully. Right now, we offer these capabilities to our corporate partners, but our goal is to provide them to the rest of our customer base. It is not an easy process, but the result is well worth it," says Hannes Jansen, writer and editor at SoftOrbits.

Want to connect with SoftOrbits?

Whether you're a client interested in SoftOrbits' products or a business owner willing to partner with the team, you can reach out at [email protected] or visit softorbits.net.