Benefits
of the plugin

Edit individual color channels (red, green, blue) to adjust hue
Edit brightness and saturation
Change all the photos colors the same degree - rotate the photos color circle
Select and edit any range of color hues - like background color, etc.
Restrict the selected colors to any brightness-range

The Color Correction plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK

Color Correction
controls

This is the Color Corrector plug-ins control panel. Click on the photo or the links to the right to see the plug-in at full size.

The filter has five sets of controls:
1. change hue (red, green, blue, spectrum shift)
2. adjustment (Brightness and saturation)
3. brightness-range - select light or dark etc.
4. color-range - which colors to change
5. Graduated effect

Examples - remove
color cast
in shadows
or on teeth

The Color Correction plugin is ideal for subtle color corrections where the effect must be targeted at a specific range and softly integrated into the whole. Right side is filtered.

Example

Color- correcting reflected lights in shadows

Without color-correction	With color-correction

Here we targeted the reflected lights on the girls face and changed them to the warm shades of light reflected from sand and water. First we used color-range to include only reds and magenta. Then we used brightness-range to exclude the bright colors. We shifted the entire spectrum 20 degrees, but did not want to change the shadows completely. So we set the target to the lightest value of the brightness-range (165) and the softness to 80%.

The Color (hue) control set

Color (hue)...

change with the RGB channels

The first three sliders either raise or lower the specific color content of the hue being edited. They control the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) channels of the image, so removing a color will appear as an increase of its complementary. The complementary colors are...
Cyan - Red
Magenta - Green
Yellow - Blue
Regarding cyan, magenta and yellow. If you want to make dark colors any of these three, you will probably have to raise the two others. F.ex. to make a dark color cyan, you have to raise green and blue rather than lower red.

Shift entire spectrum

This will change each and every color the same amount by shifting its placement in the color-circle. It ranges from -180 to 180 degrees, so you can change a color to its complementary color. It is very useful for removing color cast locally. We used it to remove the purple cast in the girls face above. In combination with the color-range and brightness-range you can easily change background colors.

If you have a blue and rotate the wheel 90° it will become green or purple (depending on the direction), a green will become yellow or blue and so forth. Rotate a blue 180° it becomes yellow - as we did in the example where we targeted the blue sky and left the trees unchanged.

Please see example of its use at the bottom of the tutorial.

The Brightness & Saturation control set o the Photoshop pluginf

Brightness & Saturation

These are very rudimentary and not as subtle as the algorithms in the specific plug-ins for the same operations.

The Brightness-range control set

Dark limit

Light limit

Target

Softness

Dark limit - colors darker than this sliders value will not be changed.

Light limit - colors lighter than this sliders value will not be changed.

Target - colors with this degree of lightness will be changed the most (but if the softness-slider is set to 0 all will be changed equally).
Softness - 100% will force the color changes to be applied at full force only to colors that match the target value in brightness. The effect will diminish the further a given color is from the target value in brightness. When set to 0% all colors that are between the dark limit and the light limit will be changed at full force. Settings less than 100% narrow the range that gets changed at full force and widens the effect of the fade-out range. So 100% will softly integrate any changes.
This set of controls are very useful if you want to only change background color or edit the hue of a shadow.

The Color-range control set

From

Up to

Colors to the right of the From slider and to the left of the Up to slider will be changed. You can place the top slider to the right of the lower one to include both blues and green (f.ex). All will set the sliders to include all colors.
These range controls are also good for targeting background colors for single editing. In the example below we targeted the blue background color of the sky.

When you check the Mask Unchanged checkbox all colors outside the limits set by the brightness-range and color-range will be colored with a monochrome color. In this case it is red, but you can change the color by clicking in the colored rectangle.

This is the setting we used to make the selection of blues ...

This is the before and after image. We simply reduced brightness to deepen the overexposed sky. We did not change the color -- so in this case you could have done the same with the brightness editor plug-in.

Tip

Tip

First set the color-range and brightness-range (or vice-versa). Then do the general color-correction and afterwards decide how to set the softness and target. Finally tune the color-correction.

Graduated effect

These controls are common for many of the Power Retouche plug-ins. Using graduated effect will cause the filter to apply it's filtering at full strength in one side of the image and then fade the effect out towards the other side. You can change direction by right clicking the preview. Midpoint will shift the balance between how large an area will be filtered at full strength and how much will have a faded out effect. Contrast will change the accelleration and spread of the fade-out.



In this example we applied a graduated effect to the top left corner. By shifting spectrum towards purple we created more contrast to the green grass and removed the greenish colorcast.

Color values

This lets you pick a spot in the preview and get the data of the colors of the changed image in RGB and CMYK. L is the lightness in percent. The values dR, dG, dB and dL show how many percent the RGB colors and the lightness has changed.