Motivation: Color Corrections can be very easy to do.
Darkroom Assistant: Corel PhotoPaint 11

In our series on Photo-editing 101, we are using the acronym CAST - Cropping, Adjusting color, Sharpening and Touch-ups to cover the basic photo editing workflow. And in the course of our discussions we have warned readers that Adjusting Colors can be the most challenging part of photo editing(some might argue that achieving WYSIWYP-What You See Is What You Print is by far the most challenging task in digital image processing- but that is another story).

So just to be contrarian, the first session on Color Corrections/Adjustments shows a case where color adjustments are easy to do. Now the fact that we use Corel's PhotoPaint may have a little to do with this since its line up of color correction tools is one of the best in the business. But it is also a mark of the improving performance of digital cameras.

The Santa Parade in Toronto for 2002 was treated to a persistent wet snowstorm. This made for demanding photo conditions for my Canon D30. I had to increase the ASA to 400 (800 and 1600 are available but I find depending on the zoom and F-stop settings, the deterioration in shots can be high- so I avoid these higher ASA settings except in controlled conditions). I switched the camera out of autofocus but on to auto exposure by aperture priority using a Tamron 28-300mm zoom lens. Most of the shots were being taken at 1/30 to 1/90of a second but many were zoomed out well beyond 150mm. Despite these marginal shooting conditions most of the shots came in fairly sharp and reasonably color balanced with a tendency for 1/2 to 1&1/2 stop of under exposure.

The bottom line - digital cameras are turning out ever better exposures for both color balance and brightness/contrast. So the relatively straight forward color corrections I am about to show you should be the norm not the exception.

	Here is a classic winter shot - the snow is gray and the overall shot is under exposed. In PhotoPaint we have an embarrassment of riches: at least four menu choices to handle this situation - all under the Images | Adjust menus. Tone Curve allows for brightness contrast corrections selectively over the linear white to black gradient. Color Tone allows the user to change contrast, saturation, and brightness using six thumbnails of the image as guides - + or - contrast, etc(its easier to use than to describe). Hue Saturation Lightness provides similar functionality but using sliders
instead of thumbnails. And Brightness/Contrast/ Intensity also has sliders for making corrections and a good preview window. for tracking the adjustments. So I chose to use the last tool - Images | Adjust | Brightness/Contrast/Intensity is the PhotoPaint menu choice. Here is the rule to follow when using this tool. Use contrast sparingly - keeping it as close as possible to its 0 pintail setting. Instead use intensity and brightness sliders to make most if not all the corrections. So increased the intensity until the snow turned from gray to white. Then I pulled back a bit on the brightness as overall the luminosity was too bright.
	The resulting image is show on the left. the color balance and saturation turned out pretty good. And the snow is fairly uniformly white (no gray vignetting at the edges either). However, the three girls in the windows are still under exposed. So I masked-off the face and hat of each girl and then made Color Corrections. This time I used the Images | Adjust | Tone Curve because it has a little more range with flesh tones. But realistically any of the other 4 PhotoPaint color adjustment tools could have been used.
	As can be seen from the picture on the left the little girls don't look like they are hiding but actually having fun in the parade. However one more touch up correction was made Using Effects | Sharpen | Sharpen the picture was snapped into slightly sharper focus. We tried some specially effects like Effects | Artistic | Colored Pencil to give the picture the fast, pencil sketch look but that did not pan out. However, the important point is that we could try it out quickly and then back off.
So in three fairly easy color correction steps we are able to move an okay picture to an image closer to the minds eye. It would be even closer, if we had masked out the highlight greens in order to preserve their softer color tones - only suggesting the warmer and lighter colors of the current "after" image. Or an overall darker tone could be adopted desaturating all of the colors. These are the kinds of options that are easy to follow up on in the digital software lab (making copies of images is trivially fast and cheap); yet so expensive of time and costly materials in the wet photo darkroom. And with ink jet printers now delivering archival ink and paper combinations - many photographers will be making the switch to all digital.