Curvemeister Forum

Greg, yes you are 100% right. I've wandered how Dan would adjust his workflow if he worked on a PC and with CM. 

Hi Doug,

Dan suggests beginning by removing colour casts from the image, using curves, in RGB.

The advantage of removing casts in RGB is that most colour casts are not even across the brightness range of the image (which is why setting white balance in camera/during Raw conversion doesn't always completely remove colour casts).

The problem is that Dan also advises importing a tonally flat image into Photoshop, and - as you say - setting shadow/highlight endpoints during step 2 (the luminance enhancement stage). This strategy means that during the colour correction step, the image does not span the full length of the curve, which means that colour casts cannot be attended to with the same degree of finesse as would be possible if the image spanned the full length of the curve.

This is to say that if the shadows, midtones and highlights are closer together than they ought to be (a problem that Dan's advice creates), an adjustment to the midtones will change the shadows and highlights to a far greater degree than would be the case if tonal range was already established.

I do agree that luminance enhancement should come after colour correction, but it makes no sense technically to try to remove colour casts in RGB, without first establishing tonal range*.

*By 'establishing tonal range' I don't mean setting shadows to 0,0,0 and highlights to 255,255,255 - because at that point you cannot be sure whether shadows and highlights should be neutral - I mean stretching the tonal range so that one of the three channels is set to 0 (or 255); in Curvemeister the thresholding feature can do this; this can also be put right during Raw conversion.

All the best,
Lee.

Thanks for your informative reply Lee, yes it make sense :D

No problem Ganna - glad to help  :)

Incidentally, stretching the tonal range of the image without neutralising the shadows/highlights (and potentially introducing a colour cast), is really easy to do in Photoshop - it's an automatic adjustment: Image > Auto Contrast

I would advise everyone to apply Auto Contrast before removing colour casts from their images using RGB curves; doing this will allow you to be very precise in your curve writing.

Cheers,
Lee.

So far, I have found CM to be very, very useful in color correction, contrast enhancement, and the PPW color boost.  There are other steps in the Modern Color Workflow that CM does not "compete."  I could go chapter by chapter.  Many tools especially sharpening are not directly involved with CM's strength. 

So far, the MMM is a potential new tool that is color and not CM.  In several images I tried, the CM with contrast worms had a different effect but it was a matter of taste which was better.  I would A/B them and not decide. 

Bottom line, CM is not leaving my tool chest.  Every image I edit has one to three CM passes.  Not every image gets MMM,.  If I had a slug of well exposed images, I might not use it.  A problem or important image will get multiple CM and MMM and color boost attempts to fix. 

The sharpening is a keeper. 

Just my 2 cents.