Let's Get the Party Started.....

[ggroess]

Thomas,
Right Click on the image in CM and choose "Set Neutral". 
Then if you need to move the neutral around a bit to find a better one you can. The Hue clock on the upper right of the CM window can help you find the right spot.  The mouse in the screen shot is set on a fairly solid neutral.  The little target at the base of the cliff is where I chose to set it for this shot.  There are many others you can use any true white or true black can serve as a neutral if you need them to.

Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Yes it worked. Results with blue pin seem to very much depending on grey point chosen.
Thanks.
Thomas

[kessi]

My attempt at the Lighthouse: I did a few trial runs in CM trying to get the white wave crests to have more definition, but did not get it right. I then used PSElements 6, selected the ocean and darkened highlights which brought out the texture of the whites. With the ocean still selected I used CM to give it the blue I liked by using Lab, (for the first time ever not in Wizard mode). Back in PSE I then selected the rocks in the foreground and used CM to give them more colour. It might be too much but I like the orange lichen to pop out. Back to PSE to select the sky and having seen Greg's post about using the pins, I used the Brodie sky pin and fiddled a bit with the blue in the blue panel of Lab. Back to PSE to sharpen and resize.
I need to get the hang of the hue clock and pins. I don't really understand them.

kessi

[ggroess]

The hue clock is going to be a very good friend of yours....not to worry...

Basically it works this way....

The hand of the clock points to the color...
the length of the hand shows the saturation of the color....

The longer the hand the more saturated the color. A neutral Gray is a dot in the center of the clock.  It is showing you the color under the pointer of the mouse.  I have my display set to LAB mode but it can display in RGB as well. 

We will also be using a floating hue clock later in the course.  You can set floating clocks at various points on the image by Alt-clicking a point in the image.  They look exactly like the pin marker but they show adjustment when you make color adjustments.  There is a whole assignment on Color By the Numbers that will really make hue clocks easy and very informative.

Great job on the correction by the way...
Greg

[kessi]

Thanks Greg. I have been playing around with the hue clock and the concept is becoming much clearer. Actually it seems to be quite a powerful tool.
regards,
kessi

[ggroess]

Yes it worked. Results with blue pin seem to very much depending on grey point chosen.
Thanks.
Thomas

It depends more on the color space and the lightness of the gray point chosen.  The pins function best in RGB where you can have multiple pins so long as they have different brightness values. Lab will only really allow 1 pin plus the S/H/N placement.

Greg