Demo 2.0

[mikemeister_admin]

I have looked through the demo and I guess I am missing something.
What does Curvemeister do that is not available by using Photoshop tools?
Also the 2.0 demo is a bit buggy: the pin palette is not always available and the plug in has crashed CS3 a couple of times.

[-default]

In addition to the interface improvements, Curvemeister provides a large number of conveniences, allowing you do do things in Photoshop much more easily than is possible with curves, and opens up the possibility of working in multiple color spaces much more easily than before. 

For example, in Curvemeister you can set a shadow, highlight, and a neutral, then compare the appearance of the image in RGB, Lab and CMYK space in a matter of seconds, picking the one the looks best.  This can be done manually in Photoshop, but it takes so long that most people don't bother, and instead work in only one color space. 

Thanks for the heads up on the bugs.  If you can let me know how the crash happened, or in what way the pin palette is not available, please let me know.  I give crash bugs the highest priority, and will stop other development work until they are resolved.  Usually, after a crash, there is an error report dialog that can provide me with very valuable information.

Thanks for trying the demo, and reporting the problems.

Mike

[derekfountain]

What does Curvemeister do that is not available by using Photoshop tools?

It's more a question of how it does it, rather than what it does. To experiment how curves affect the image with different colour spaces in standard Photoshop would take ages. With CM it takes a couple of seconds to click through each colour space in order to make a decision on which one is best to use. It's probably possible to pin colours in standard Photoshop curves, but it's not something I ever figured out how to do. With CM it's trivially easy. Even simple things like being able to move both ends of a Lab colour curve simultaneously to evenly increase saturation make a huge difference to the speed of workflow.

Give it a bit longer and sign up for the monthly class. I suspect that of the people interested enough in colour theory to get as far as the CM website and demo, the product itself would be useful to maybe 90% of them.

[mikemeister_admin]

I very much agree with the other answers and want to add to them...

CM allows me to quickly and easily get absolutely accurate colors. Oh, quickly pinning to neutral is a great start and most CM users stick to that. However, if you really use the pins to their fullest, you can get much finer and broader color accuracy.

I use the paint chip pins. I use both the Sears and Benjamin Moore ones. (OK, I helped pick these and worked with the Meister on this.) I have a couple of small boards where I've taped the 9 or 10 chips to the boards.

When I have a series of shots where I want accurate color, I take a picture of the paint chip board in the scene. Then I shoot away. When I get them all in Photoshop, the first picture I open is the one with the paint chip board. I open this RAW file with no ACR adjustments. Then I pin all or some of those colors to make a complex curve. I save that curve to a file.

For all the rest of the pictures I open the same way. I then open CM and just load that saved curve file. Just like that, every picture taken in the same light is quickly and easily corrected to have absolutely accurate color.

Yes, Photoshop has white balance in ACR. It also has a curve tool. You can get close to absolutely accurate colors in Photoshop, but sometime close isn't close enough. Part of the reason is that you usually have to GUESS the spot to work with. It's a judgment call based on your eye; this may not be right. For example, what is really neutral in the picture? There may be spots where things look pretty neutral to you, but they may not be perfectly neutral. Using those spots will get you close, but it can be a tad off. The human eye is amazingly fine tuned to color variations, but it isn't perfect.

I've tried worked with Photoshop's tools to get the best color I could. It's amazing to me that CM almost always makes it a little better beyond that. Yes, it's noticeable too.

If quick and easy color correcting to the best possible color accuracy is an issue with you, CM is the tool you want.

Clyde