Life is sometimes complicated... it's taken a couple few hours to check it out, but long story short, I can suggest skipping this GOTD. It seems to set the overall levels, which as a 1st easy step to optimizing a photo is a good thing. but then it messes up the colors. And with only 2 adjustments that can be set to auto, that's it. If it was a portable app that you could try risk free, I'd say why not, but it's anything but. Monitoring the install in my Win11 VM, it rewrote the registry's component hive -- the plain text file listing the added entries is over 62MB! You get its HDX4 image processor in Program Files\ Common Files\, the program's folder, 4 folders in ProgramData, a folder in C:\Users\ [UserName]\ AppData\ Local\, and one folder and several files in Windows\ Installer\.
There are some higher end apps, Photoshop plugins, and web services that offer automatic [hands-free] image optimization using AI, and depending on the photo, they can sometimes do a pretty good job. And there are several smaller, usually lower cost apps that claim to do the same thing, like Simply Good Pictures 5. They'll make a few canned adjustments that usually improve a photo's appearance enough to justify using them if you're mainly interested in quick & easy [with the emphasis on Quick]. I used Photolemur that way to knock out a couple thousand old photos I scanned using a document scanner. In quick testing Simply Good Pictures doesn't measure up to alternatives from companies like Ashampoo, or Engelmann for that matter [I didn't think their Photomizer was too bad when it was on GOTD].
From the download page:
"You can do the similar enhancements if you add 10% color, 10% brightness and 10% contrast on your regular photo editor."
If that's what does it for you, great! Otherwise, adding [increasing] brightness is more of a kludge if you have an underexposed [too dark] photo and can't adjust exposure in whatever software and don't know about adjusting the gamma. When it comes to increasing contrast, adjust the levels instead -- most every photo editing app will let you adjust levels. Adding color is a bit unclear -- what if I add an orange color? :) If you mean increasing the color saturation, then yes, that can help if the original is a bit washed out, which can happen depending on whatever you used to get the photo in the 1st place, e.g., camera, scanner etc.
[What took so long?... The window to enter the key wouldn't display properly in my Win11 VM, so I rebooted into a copy of Win10 that had Windows Sandbox installed [can't use it with V/Box]. Then while I was installing the app in the sandbox Win10 decided to upgrade my graphics driver, messing everything up. After a reboot I had to find and download the full driver [as opposed to the limited Microsoft version], install it, reboot, then remove 2.5GB of the old driver packs, then finally go about installing the software in the sandbox and test it. Back to normal in this copy of Win11 I thought it might be cool to compare the results with Photomizer from the same dev., a prior GOTD I had kept. It was unactivated (!) so I uninstalled that, cleaning up some of the garbage left over. Finally, after all the tail chasing I opened the test images I had gotten out of Simply Good Pictures in P/shop to check out the histograms, curves, levels etc. ]