  Aims. We present the B-, V- and K-band surface photometry catalogs obtained
running the automatic software GASPHOT on galaxies from the WINGS cluster
survey having isophotal area larger than 200 pixels. The catalogs can be
downloaded at the Centre de Donnees Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS). Methods.
We outline the GASPHOT performances and compare our surface photometry with
that obtained by SExtractor, GALFIT and GIM2D. This analysis is aimed at
providing statistical information about the accuracy generally achieved by the
softwares for automatic surface photometry of galaxies. Results. For each
galaxy and for each photometric band the GASPHOT catalogs provide the
parameters of the Sersic law best-fitting the luminosity profiles. They are:
the sky coordinates of the galaxy center (R:A:; DEC:), the total magnitude (m),
the semi-major axis of the effective isophote (Re), the Sersic index (n), the
axis ratio (b=a) and a flag parameter (QFLAG) giving a global indication of the
fit quality. The WINGS-GASPHOT database includes 41,463 galaxies in the B-band,
42,275 in the V-band, and 71,687 in the K-band. We find that the bright
early-type galaxies have larger Sersic indices and effective radii, as well as
redder colors in their center. In general the effective radii increase
systematically from the K- to the V- and B-band. Conclusions. The GASPHOT
photometry turns out to be in fairly good agreement with the surface photometry
obtained by GALFIT and GIM2D, as well as with the aperture photometry provided
by SExtractor. The main advantages of GASPHOT with respect to other tools are:
(i) the automatic finding of the local PSF; (ii) the short CPU time of
execution; (iii) the remarkable stability against the choice of the initial
guess parameters. All these characteristics make GASPHOT an ideal tool for
blind surface photometry of large galaxy samples in wide-field CCD mosaics.
