1. A method of identifying a subject with a disease of the retina comprising automatically detecting in a digital color fundus photograph of the subject abnormal objects in an Image ORG , comprising: a. reducing intensity variation in the Image ORG producing a shade-corrected image, Image SC and a background image, Image BG ; b. automatically detecting candidate objects in the Image SC ; and c. automatically classifying the candidate objects as abnormal or normal, wherein classification of an object as abnormal identifies a subject with a disease of the retina, wherein step b comprises, removing bright lesions in the Image SC to produce an Image PP , training a classifier with a supervised procedure using example pixels extracted from a labeled reference standard training set, obtaining pixel feature vectors from the Image PP comprising applying filters for determining pixel intensities or other characteristics of pixels at each pixel location or pixel region in the Image PP , automatically classifying each of a plurality of the Image PP pixels as foreground or background pixels, assigning a posterior probability of being a foreground pixel to each Image PP pixel according to the equation p=n/k, producing an Image PROB , removing the Image PROB pixels where the posterior probability is less than a probability threshold, producing an Image BIN-PC , removing any object in the Image BIN-PC with a size that is above a size threshold, generating a plurality of one or more seed coordinates, applying a region-growing procedure using the plurality of one or more seed coordinates to the Image SC to grow a set of candidate objects, and filling empty pixels within the grown objects of the set of candidate objects.