Motivation: Color Corrections have been greatly enhanced in Paint Shop Pro 8
Software: Paint Shop Pro 8
 

The before image	The after image

We are spending extra time on color corrections because that is one area that can be most challenging in digital darkroom work. Often one can get close with a little effort but to arrive at outstanding color corrections is much more challenging. Fortunately, Paint Shop Pro version 8 has considerably eased that task with some outstanding new and revised color correction dialogs. We look at two here.

The problem with digital photographs, even with some of the cleverest auto-correction features for white balance and color composition is that in the hurry of catching moments in time color correction comes in fourth after focus, composition, and exposure settings. In short it is easy to take a digital photo which needs color corrections. Fortunately, the digital darkroom software and Paint Shop pro 8 in particular makes the task a lot easier.

Look at the left image at the top. It has a silvery gray patina partially due to the at dusk shots taken on a overcast day. PaintShop Pro 8 supplies a Manual Color Correction dialog that helps immensely in getting shots with color drifts due to whatever cause back on in sparkling fashion

The Manual CCD-Color Correction Dialog provides the usual before and after preview. One can see that the current Manual CCD settings really improves the color of the image already. That is due to the fact that most images have a slight grayish cast - and so we have set the default to be to remove a light gray cast on the image. So note we have the Preset target color radio button selected and Pure Colors as our color adjustment. Then in the color pulldown in the middle we have selected pure white (note the Target color at the bottom right of the dialog)as what color we are trying to correct to. The color we want to remove or correct is the silver gray patina. So we set the source to a silver gray. And the preview shows the really improved color balance. However whenever one removes gray from an image its worthwhile to restore some of the lost saturation.

So now we use the HSL saturation tool; but selectively. The light tones we do not want to color them. So the trick is to use the magic wand tool to selectively choose the brighter colors (Magic Wand with tolerance at 20). Followed by Selections | Modify | Select Similar value=5 discontiguous(the colors do not have to be touching to be selected). Then feather the results so the saturation will blend in using Selections | Modify | Feather value=3.

And now we are ready to increase the saturation using the menu command Adjust | Hue and Saturation | Hue/Saturation/Lightness. notice in the preview window, the masked off areas which are not affected by the HSL changes are shown as transparent. We work the setting around a bit - making the hue slightly more yellow by moving it to 2. Be careful with hue changes - only slight movements can wreak drastic color hue changes. Best to experiment around with the Hue slider and settings to see what it can do. Likewise, photofinishers are advised to be careful with saturation settings. Overworking these settings can give a"rouged up" over colored kill look to images. Hence the use of selection and feathering to just apply the colors in the mid and dark tones and less of the delicate highlights in pastel purple and sandy tan. Finally we try a little smoothing in the dark areas with the Adjust | Add Remove Noise | texture Preserving Smooth command. This command works somewhat similar to the Edge Preserving Smooth but retains small bumps and texture and smooth transitions. Again users will have to try it to see how they like it. As always it is very simple to back off by Edit | Undo command.

The whole attraction of the digital environs is that users can try thing with low risk of doing permanent damage. In fact one method I use is to Save As a file2 and the file3 up to fileN versions of the file I am editing so I can step back to anyplace at anytime. Often, of course the intermediates can generate their own separate tree of edits. Alternately users can follow the Photoshop model and create more layers and filter effects on separate layers. Most important - take advantage of the Moore and his law - disk space is cheap.

Jacques Surveyer is still trying to get the colors right at PicsofToronto.