Most imaging tools treat exposure as a linear problem: If a picture is too dark, lighten it. Too light? Darken it. The results are often uneven and unbalanced; details are lost in the highlights and shadows, and visual noise can become excessive. Digital SHO Professional 1.1 (the newest version of the excellent Adobe Photoshop plug-in) avoids these problems by using sophisticated algorithms to tweak highlights and shadows independently.

Although the Help menu provides pragmatic guidance, you don't really have to understand how SHO works to use it effectively, and experimenting with the controls provides an intuitive lesson. Four sliders control the amount of detail in shadows and highlights, how much of the light and dark areas are affected (threshold), and color saturation. The zoomable preview can show the original image, the current edit, or the black-and-white threshold view. A smaller view of the original image in the upper right corner helps you navigate when the preview is zoomed in. SHO handles the data from digital captures differently than scanned pictures originally shot with film, bringing out the best in each.

SHO transformed dark or dull pictures into vibrant, colorful, and superbly exposed images. Although the price is rather high, if you have important photos that you can't reshoot, Digital SHO Professional 1.1 works better than any other similar tool we've used.