How Viesus Fixes Photos Before They Print, with Servi Pieters

Your customer doesn’t order a “file” they order a memory, and nothing kills that moment faster than a print that looks worse than the phone screen. We sit down with Servi Pieters, CEO of Viesus, to unpack why modern photo printing faces new traps: HDR smartphone displays, print workflows, heavy social media compression, and low-light computational photography that looks fine on glass but falls apart on paper.

Pieters gets specific about what an automatic image enhancement layer actually does inside high-volume labs and print providers. Pieters shares a real-world KPI wake-up call: One company saw complaint rates jump when Viesus was inadvertently disabled, then drop by 58% when it was turned back on. He also talks about the hidden conversion problem with resolution and DPI warnings, and how reliable upscaling and artifact removal can keep shoppers from abandoning an order while still keeping the photo authentic.

From skin tone handling and scene-aware correction to tuning for different substrates like paper, metal, canvas, and textiles, this is a practical conversation for anyone building a photo lab workflow, a personalization program, or a print-on-demand business. Pieters also discusses new PDF features, including how Viesus can extract images, enhance them, and place them back without disturbing the rest of the file.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Meet Viesus

Erin Manning 0:10

The Dead Pixel Society Podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to The Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:30

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Servi Pieters, who's the CEO of Viesus, and he's coming to us from Switzerland today, the world headquarters of image correction. Hi Servi, how are you today?

Servi Pieters 0:49

Hi here, Gary. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

Gary Pageau 0:54

So you've got a lot of exciting things going on right now in the world of Viesus. Let's talk a little bit about where the company came from, how you became involved in it, and what it is exactly you do.

How Viesus Became Its Own Company

Servi Pieters 1:09

So I started my career in tech consulting at the UI, working for companies like Anti. And then my father took over Imaging Solutions, which maybe some of you know is a machine building company in Switzerland. And then he asked me to join. And yes, I was up for another enter in Switzerland. I was living in the Netherlands, so I joined Imaging Solutions. Back in two years, I was doing some projects there for digitization. And then that's how I got to know Viesus. And Viesus was like in slide decks on the last slide. Then we started to see the potential of Viesus. It was like the way more potential than being on the last slide of slide deck.

Gary Pageau 1:52

So so so for those who are familiar, what is Viesus before we get much further? What is it used for?

Servi Pieters 1:58

Well, I thought it was already working at one of the bigger photo labs in the industry and enhancing all of their images.

Gary Pageau 2:06

Yeah.

Servi Pieters 2:07

So there was like, whoa, this is great. I mean and doing all these enhancements that people also will hold in their hands. That's a huge impact.

Gary Pageau 2:16

Yeah. So but from there you saw this at an opportunity to be a separate business as opposed to a component of a machine building company.

Servi Pieters 2:27

Exactly. So there were several opportunities to make Visas better, but since the imaging solution business was focused on machine building, we could utilize the full potential, it's not utilized. Yeah, yeah. So we came up with a plan and I started to join a team. We invested in Visas. Instead of being the last slide on the slide deck, it's now its own slide deck and even an own company. Yeah. So it could serve also other industries.

Gary Pageau 2:58

So what is the typical product implementation of Visas? You said it does image correction, but it's really sort of

Why Prints Fail Without Smart Correction

Gary Pageau 3:05

a workflow component at that time, right?

Servi Pieters 3:10

Exactly. So it's more like an image quality layer in those photo printing companies where all the images flow through. It's being analyzed and being enhanced where it's needed, rather than being an editor with sliders that's being presented to each user or consumer.

Gary Pageau 3:27

So if someone's in someone's interacting with Vizus in a lot of ways, they may not even know they're interacting with it from that consumer level.

Servi Pieters 3:35

Exactly. That's the special part. So nobody's known that we are behind it enhancing it. They just got a beautiful print.

Gary Pageau 3:42

So when you're trying to convince someone who is a photo lab who is maybe just plugging away doing pictures, and they think, well, we have you know the color management that our vendor gave us, we have this, we have that tool. Why do we need the Visu Slayer on top of that? Because a lot of times, you know, I've been hearing from printers, especially people who come from the digital space, maybe not the photo lab space, but maybe they're getting into photo. You know, they seem to say, well, HP has all these tools.

Servi Pieters 4:14

An interesting story is for a company that has a millions of revenue that's using Visas. They suddenly saw that the KPIs of complaints went out. What happened was is that Visa was disabled. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And that's when they start tracking, okay, we need to look closer, what will happen when Visays is enabled again. And then they saw a drop of 58% in complaints.

Gary Pageau 4:42

Okay.

Servi Pieters 4:42

So this unattended image enhancement makes the MS loops better because the problem that most consumers have is that they order from a smartphone display. It's alcoholic catabret, it's way wider. You then nowadays we have these great HDR displays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But getting that on print is something completely different.

Gary Pageau 5:03

So let's talk a little bit about that because you know we would like to think we live in a closed loop world where color management is all consistent, but we clearly do not. I mean, everyone's got print, like you said, there's reflective prints, there's screens, there's transparencies, there's all these things that people see. Is that what Visual does? Is trying to manage those expectations across the different platforms?

Servi Pieters 5:29

So it's been built that people are unaware of what they need that they need to enhance an image. If the image is already good, then Visa will do not that much to an image. But it's coming from different platforms like social media, where there's maybe a lot of compression that might not be visible on your smartphone, but it will be visible print. So we use features to remove the compression artifacts.

Gary Pageau 5:52

So I I guess my idea is that what I'm trying to say is you know, you get people who are like, hey, look great on my phone, I want it to look great on print, but they don't realize, like you said, maybe the resolution is a term, but just the fact they're viewing it on a completely different visual platform than a physical print. Do you do anything to like make to like interpret that? Hey, they were seeing this on a screen, so therefore we need to do this when it's on this output medium.

Servi Pieters 6:21

So especially for like HDR, which creates a whole new dynamical range in brightness, usually the the game maps are not using visas, are being ignored. So the SDR file is being printed, but the consumer sees an HDR photo on the display. So what we do is we take the game map into account and do a mapping so that this great contrast-looking photo looks like how they they they order it they took on their phone.

Gary Pageau 6:58

So when you talk about getting back to kind of the KPI thing, right? The the interpretation from the customer that the satisfaction is much higher with you know built-in image enhancement, is that something you've been able to communicate to customers directly? Is that just KPI? I mean, do people buy more? I guess is the question when they have a positive experience with the output.

Servi Pieters 7:23

Yeah, definitely. So what we see is that if you, for example, on the DPI check, if you show them a warning that the image is maybe not the right resolution to print, they might get insecure and cancel the order. If you have a solution for them, like you can print it because you can upscale it reliably and still have the photo look authentic and sharp. Yeah. And the order moves.

Gary Pageau 7:48

You know, that's it. You know, that's interesting you bring that up because that's something that is one of those things that has always been there in photography. I remember back when I was with PMA and we did consumer research and photography and what why people print it. Almost always consumers, unless they really knew what they were doing, if they got back a bad print, they blame themselves. They didn't say, they didn't really have an insight into the process that hey, maybe this processor's chemicals were out of whack, or there was something wrong with the paper, or you know, the exposure wasn't right, or something like that. They blame themselves more often than, you know, like you said, they and and and and that sort of insight is discouraging, right? People don't want to don't want to involve photography if they get bad results because they blame themselves.

Servi Pieters 8:41

Yes. Exactly. So people just want to have a good quality print. So the company needs to do that prints it, needs to use the full potential of what you can do with an image. And if there is a potential to improve the image, automatically you should do it to make the customer more satisfied.

What Viesus Enhances Automatically

Gary Pageau 9:00

So, what are some of the things specifically that Vzus does? Because when you talk about image enhancement, that's just it's more than just brightening and sharpening and some tweakage of the color game. I mean, there's there's really a like a menu of things that Viesus does.

Servi Pieters 9:17

There's a long list of features. It really depends on, for example, is it uh a certain scene, is it landscape, is it planning photography, is it a newborn piece is completely optimized for these scenes?

Gary Pageau 9:33

So, in other words, when it sees a picture, it knows hey, there's a lot of skin tones here, I need to optimize for that, as opposed to I'm seeing a lot of blues and greens. This is probably a landscape picture, so I need to optimize for that.

Servi Pieters 9:47

So there'll be probably most companies choose for to boost the greens a bit more because people would like to have landscape photos a bit more popping when they want to have a poster or something.

Gary Pageau 9:59

And then, but then again, skin tones also are very, very important. So I mean that's a whole other science in itself.

Servi Pieters 10:06

Yeah, that's it's super important, and that's also where we build features for in special portrait scenes and where we take the skin tones into account for seeing how they are being reproduced.

Gary Pageau 10:17

So when you talk about someone earlier who said you know they turned off Visuus for whatever reason, yeah, can they go through and select which features they want, like of that menu? Can or is it an all-in-one sort of selection?

Tuning For Products And Substrates

Gary Pageau 10:31

So, how do usually go is we work with the quality people of the company?

Servi Pieters 10:36

We set up or fine-tune the parameters basic on their requirements, what are the photo print products? Sometimes you need to fine-tune the announcement for a photo book differently than for a towel that you want to personalize. Right, yeah, yeah. Or different printer, right? You have HP printer scannon printers, you might also want to treat differently for that.

Gary Pageau 10:59

So, do you so you have to optimize for different plitting? Because you got, you know, there's all kinds of things people print on, right now, right? I mean, it was always easier back in the days of silver halide. We had basically one medium, and now you've got, you know, metal, canvas, paper, like you said, cloth now, t t-shirts are a big thing right now, hats and all these other medium. And you've got to try and make everything look consistent across those.

Servi Pieters 11:22

That'd be a big challenge, and it's also something we do not alone. It's also with the quality people of the photo printing companies, but different materials so on some materials, an image can look more dull because it's you know the nature of the material that we know we need to fine-tune it in such a way to maybe maybe boost more contrast and boost the colors with certain scenes for this photo product.

PDFs And Print On Demand Challenges

Gary Pageau 11:45

So, where are you seeing some of your growth in terms of customers, right? Because you've got a lot of photo labs, but again, we're seeing a lot of people, like you said, from the commercial printing space and people like that who are doing some of these things. Are you seeing a lot of growth in those areas of people who want to do either personalized products or print on demand and this sort of intersection of that?

Servi Pieters 12:08

Yeah, that's a good point. So I think we saw definitely a growth in print on demand where people can more design their own like flyers and that kind of things, but they are not always aware that you need to upload a full RENS image. And now they they could be like a bakery that wants to order flyers, but the baker doesn't know. He can do it himself nowadays, but he doesn't know the specifics always to upload a higher image.

Gary Pageau 12:36

Or they're designing some something in Canva and they don't know how to export the PDF properly, which is almost always what happens.

Servi Pieters 12:43

So Vizus also goes into PDFs and takes the images out, enhance them, puts them back in and doesn't touch the rest of the PDF.

Gary Pageau 12:52

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Because that was one of the things I saw in here when I was reviewing, you know, the the Visual's portfolio of prices, the PDF piece. So you've really gotten into the general print space, right?

Servi Pieters 13:04

Yeah, that's yeah. So what's like a demand from the industry to that we support PDFs?

Printing United Plans And Demos

Gary Pageau 13:11

So speaking of the general print industry, when this drops, you'll actually be in Las Vegas, Nevada. Can you talk a little bit about what's going to be happening with Visuals at Printing United?

Servi Pieters 13:24

So we will be with Viesus at the ARW, Printing United. There we'll be doing the keynotes, we will be doing live workshops so people can actually bring files where they know they have problems with. We have one of our engineers there that will enhance it for you directly, do some explanations, and we will have a boot there. So we are always there for questions or short demos of the visas technology.

Gary Pageau 13:49

Okay. And so, I mean, because what's interesting to me is you've had a lot of attention the last few months with coming more to the forefront of people's awareness. You were just recognized as a Tepo and at the Teepo awards, which is, you know, generally speaking, an end user type thing, you know, best camera, best whatever. And you got recognized for that. Was that why do you think that is that you're coming to the forefront now?

Awards And The Invisible Backend

Servi Pieters 14:17

I I think they are aware that with a lot of photo printed images these days that they that people hold in their hands, that they are being enhanced by Visa. For us, that's especially great because it's like a recognition. Because these people don't know that yeah, that the image was enhanced by Visa because it's integrated in in the photo printing's infrastructure in the back ends.

Gary Pageau 14:40

Yeah. Well, which they may not even be aware of. I mean, that's the thing that got me what when you won the award was you know, this is not like something people are even in most cases aware of that's being applied to their printed images.

Servi Pieters 14:54

Or exactly. Some companies don't tell it, they have somewhere state that we do an auto-image enhancement. Some people make it like a toggle that's by default on, so that like the pro photographers can switch it off, of course, because they want to be sure nothing gets touched. Some photo companies decide that they can still influence some sliders, so but people have some creative freedom, which I wouldn't recommend because people overdo it, yeah, or they want to edit every photo of them, but when there are 100 photos in a photo album, they might never complete it.

Gary Pageau 15:29

So I that's another question. So can can you implement Visa's like with as sort of like a I would say an image correction program, but you because I always envisioned it was more like a secret sauce application globally to an image, but you can offer the option to offer it as sort of almost like a tool set to users.

Servi Pieters 15:52

You could, yes, but it's not intended. That's it's not recommended, right? Yeah, so I think the the the world of image editors, there are lots out of there, and our strength is actually three things having quality but also consistency in the output, so that not there doesn't need to be a person checking every image being enhanced that you can rely on the output.

Gary Pageau 16:17

Yeah, because I think one of the challenges you would have with that is you but you know you get people tweaking things out of gamut, and then you get error messages, and then it's a whole complicated process, right? Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Servi Pieters 16:29

And all kinds of people are ordering photos. Some people with the brightness full at 100%, and then you think they need to tone down the brightness, but you almost need to have it like an aesthetic layer, like where it goes, this is just bad, don't do it. My view is just upload a photo, have it in hand, but they don't know it and have a good print quality.

Gary Pageau 16:51

Yeah.

Servi Pieters 16:52

Because that's what they want in the end, right? A good print.

AI That Stays Authentic

Gary Pageau 16:55

So Viesus is an is an example of what I would call sort of like the an application of AI that people don't know it's AI, right? In the sense that, you know, you're using all the knowledge you have from analyzing images for so many years to create, which is really what an AI does, right? It analyzes a set of data and creates a process out of that historical information. How how long did it take you to get to that point where you said, you know, we're comfortable with actually applying this to customer images? Because that wasn't what you did from day one, right?

Servi Pieters 18:00

Uh well, I yeah. So once AI got available and affordable, I think it took quite a while that it became consistent at a large scale. But it's indeed what you said, so at some point you recognize patterns. So for example, with JPEG compression artifacts, that's a pattern you can learn and you know how to remove at some point.

Gary Pageau 18:22

So it could actually look into like the file format and look at the biases within that. Exactly. Yes.

Servi Pieters 18:29

But not every every feature doesn't have to be per se AI. Customers don't always like that because you get maybe more pushback on the performance than people say to us, improve your quality of enhancement. Because if you do large volumes of enhancements and it's requiring AI, meaning GPUs, these are costly. So you want to keep the performance up on the GPUs to not have a too big GPU randomly farm in the end.

Gary Pageau 19:02

So that's interesting because I mean, because really, if you are applying a lot of AI to let's say some of your bigger customers are doing millions of images a day, that's a lot of production hit.

Servi Pieters 19:25

If the image is really bad, it uses a heavier model. Use all kind of technologies to optimize the enhancement for the image that is given.

Gary Pageau 19:35

So, where do you see this the printing industry in terms of photo going? Because you always hear the you know, the kids don't print and all that stuff, and yet we always see, you know, it's clearly that they are printing, they're just printing a whole lot different. Yes. What is it you're hearing in the marketplace about the the outlook for printing, photo printing in particular, on all the different substrates we discovered. We discussed.

Servi Pieters 20:02

Well, that's that's a good question. I mean, there's so much going on at the moment in terms of developments, also at our customers in terms of the AI. I think there will be always a demand for authentic photos, and that's there'll be having them also print them, get them out of the digital world. Yeah, but that's also our focus. Keep those photos also as as authentic as possible, don't make them artificial. Right. Even though we apply AI to it. If someone says to me, this image looks AI, it's a complaint, not a compliment, then it's we need to go back to the barn league.

Gary Pageau 20:39

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we yeah, we always hear the frame, you know, AI slop. I think you've hit on a very important point because when you talk about like generative AI as sort of, you know, when it came on board a few years ago, it was like people were going crazy with it and they were doing you know ridiculous, and there's very little printing from that. And I think a lot of people thought there was going to be printing, but the you know, it kind of bifurcated, I think, in in a way. In other words, that became like entertainment, right? And there's an entertainment aspect to generative AI where it's amusing, and you know, you see it now on social media with people creating videos and things, and they're trying to replace Hollywood actors with AIs and all that kind of stuff. And on the other hand, there's the memories market, the family history market, all the things that you know we traditionally have the and you know, we're not in the entertainment business, we're in the authenticity business, right? If that's what you want to talk about. So, you know, I think, and I think there's almost a backlash from what I'm hearing from the marketplaces. There's almost a backlash to that in the sense where people want more authentic things, they want they want that more, which is why you got people going back and buying DVDs and CDs and LPs, and you know, they're shooting film at greater quantities than they were a few years ago. So you're really leaning into that more than the AI.

Servi Pieters 22:05

Exactly. Yes. So, I mean, if we can use AI AI to make photos better, but still looking authentic, we use AI, yeah, definitely for the upscanning part and artifacts removal. Luckily, also the majority of our customers are like that. However, sometimes we get the request for like more beautification feature features. And we thought about it as a team doing beautification at any high volume.

Gary Pageau 22:34

So by beautification, you mean like Instagram filter kind of stuff? Bigger eyes, wider teeth, smoother skin. Well, I mean, there are people who I mean that are doing that in some marketplaces, right? Like I think in the school photo market, that's like a big thing because you know you're getting the kids with you know acne and goofy face, you know. So I I can see where there is somewhat of a market, but in in general, it's probably not what people want to see.

Servi Pieters 23:02

Yeah, I think it's worth a discussion if you want to do that, apply that on a large scale and attend it and also the beauty bodies, right? Right, yeah. Yeah. What's what we want to beautify it? What's beautiful for you, what's beautiful for me.

Gary Pageau 23:16

I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, yeah, that's an interesting point because it is almost a very subjective thing. And you know, most people can say, you know, when they see somebody on let's say a social media post has been overly beautified, right? For so let's talk a little bit about let's always take it up a step when we talk about AI. When I want to talk about all the AI stuff, but I just think it's interesting because you're almost in an arms race with the cameras themselves, right? You know, the cameras themselves, like in smartphones, apply a lot of AI to images there. Do you have to kind of undo some of that stuff for printing?

Servi Pieters 23:55

They optimize it for screen, and now with HDR, they they even go beyond it's brighting up areas of the display. Yeah, people thought also, we thought sometimes also K at some point resolution will never be a problem because everyone will take sharp images, but in the end, it's not the case. That people are whenever they might have the best camera, but then take it to social media apps, upload it. We even see people taking screenshots of photos that they upload, right? Photo printing platforms, but you want to help these people too. These people also want to have a high-quality photo, so yeah, they're always indeed. So, like you said, new challenges upcoming, yeah, that we can tackle to give people beautiful prints.

Gary Pageau 24:44

Yeah, because I mean that is one of the things I'm seeing because it's like because when people talk to me, like who are just everyday consumers, and they say, I don't like AI, but my smartphone camera takes great pictures, it's like, well, there's a ton of AI in there. I mean, yes, you know, I mean, like for example, I've noticed like you very rarely see a camera, a flash used on a smartphone picture, right? Because they're using low light to capture the image and then they're enhancing it and doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

Servi Pieters 25:15

And that's kind of things, and maybe some artifacts that we take care of if you want to print it.

Gary Pageau 25:20

Yeah, that's great. So, next, so coming up soon is the after printing united, you've got the visual first conference, and you're gonna be once again sponsoring that event and attending.

Faster Upscaling And HDR For Print

Gary Pageau 25:31

What will we what will we see there as part of the visual first experience for those who are going to be there and also attending the Dead Pixel Society coffee meetup the morning before? I want to just say that's first and then visual first.

Servi Pieters 25:45

So, yeah, we we come to the S with to show what the newest fees can do, basically. So we will bring print, not just the slideshow, but we will bring actual print so you can see it's from a smartphone, a photo, how it will end up on a print, how the new features look like, how it improves the print. And I think we will bring two major topics to the US, to visual first and that Pixel Society meetup, is that we got a lot of demand, the pushback from our customers to make the upscanning faster. But this year we've fully uh invested in the quality, so making out of a few pixels even a more sharper, authentic image without hallucinating things that weren't there. So that's gonna be a huge thing that we will bring and HDR, also demand from the market, right? HDR displays from smartphones. You can take great photos with it. You can take they would look great on your smartphone because it's HDR, but most companies take in the SDR image while you can get way more out of the mapping.

Gary Pageau 26:53

So we're actually going to be using the HDR data to enhance the printing as opposed to defaulting to the standard.

Servi Pieters 26:59

Yes. Yeah. So we use the physical data, what's being used to get more contrast in the display. We use that to get more contrast on the prints.

Gary Pageau 27:10

If people want to learn more information about Ves, where can they go? Obviously, they need to stop by the AI pavilion at Printing United. They got to come have a cup

Where To Learn More

Gary Pageau 27:19

of coffee with you and then watch your presentations at Visual First. But in general, if people aren't able to meet you in person, where can they go for more information?

Servi Pieters 27:29

All right, so if they want to see what Viesus can mean for their business, they can go to viesus.com. There's a highlight contact button where you can directly contact our team. You can contact me on LinkedIn if you want to talk to me personally about one of the topics we've just been discussing. You're more interested in that. So either go to our website, viesus.com, or LinkedIn Servi Peters, and reach out.

Gary Pageau 27:55

Great. Well, appreciate it. We'll look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas and in all those other places, and talk to you soon.

Servi Pieters 28:02

It's been really great to be on the show, Gary. Thank you so much. See you soon.

Erin Manning 28:10

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixels society dot com.