Curvemeister Forum

Here are two  images that have a lot of color variation in the reds and greens..
Maximize the variation without losing the details and make these pop.

Greg

My two attempts:

Tina,

Visually, I see a bluish cyan cast..are you seeing that as well?

There is no natural neutral in this image so be careful setting one...only a true black or pure white would make good substitute for the neutral.
Greg

Wasn't expecting to find those greens in there -- 

Fantastical petal.

Art

Wow!  I can really see the blue/cyan cast in mine compared to Art's.  I only used the black point in LAB because there didn't seem to be much else to work with.  I did increase the color and brightness in the last step.  I didn't see the cast in mine at all until I saw Art's.

Tina

That is really a great lesson Tina...Your eyes are easily fooled.

Art was relying on Memory colors and knowing from CM 101 last time that green foliage is really more yellow than green.  He probably should speak more to his process than I am...

Art??  Please also send me a private e-mail I have a request for you....

Greg

Hi Tina,

Greg is right -- one's eyes are easily fooled, but the CM course you're taking with him will go a long way towards "unfooling" them, as it deals with color casts explicitly and implicitly each week, so your sense of the true value of a color will become increasingly specific and refined.  Nevertheless, during a work session one can easily habituate to a color cast and color intensity, so it's certainly an ongoing process of evaluation and comparison.  One tool I found especially helpful, in addition to those introduced in each week's lesson, and still do, is the hue clock, which is available under Curvemeister.com in the Start menu, All Programs. Click on it and a hue clock will be placed on your desktop. I find it useful when I'm looking at images or just surfing the net, to place the cursor, which is linked to the hue clock hand, on various objects to become more familiar with what colors things actually are.  Re the images of the foliage that we posted, the hue clock shows that the petals in the original image are red (although very subdued, which can deceive one as to color); the hue clock shows that the petals in your images are magenta, or between magenta and red -- i.e., in the direction of blue, so there was a color shift. After a while, you'll recognize it more or less intuitively, but it's always good to check I find; similarly for greens, which have a preponderance of yellow in them, as Greg points out here and teaches you.

By the end of the six week course all this will be well on its way to being second nature to you.  It's not an easy course, as it is teaching one a new way of seeing, but it really is revelatory, and I hope you enjoy and benefit from it as much as I did. 

If you have any questions or comments I'd be very glad to respond.

Best,
Art

Thanks, Art!  I need all of the help I can get.  I'm trying to scan all of the slides from 30 years of documentary work and the colors are all over the place.  I used Kodachrome and Ektachrome and Fujichrome and I'm scanning them with a Nikon LS5000.  I'm hoping to learn how to adjust everything for black points and white points and skin values and end up with consistent scans with no color casts.  Right now the color casts are driving me crazy.  I hope to learn how to see the casts and avoid them.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Tina

You're most welcome. Best of luck with your mammoth slide scanning/adjusting project. (I think you've come to the right place.)

I've been looking at the photos in the galleries on your website. What an impressive body of work you have!
Wonderful to see.

Art

the hue clock, which is available under Curvemeister.com in the Start menu, All Programs. Click on it and a hue clock will be placed on your desktop.

I have Windows 8 on all of my (Photoshop) computers. How do I place the Hue Clock on the desktop without a "Start" menu?