Benefits
of the plugin

Full control over black and white contrast
Preserve or remove mid tones to any degree
Balance the amount of lights and darks to correct exposure
Quick general contrast integrates color contrast and black and white contrast
Target to any range of brightness or color

The Contrast Editor filter plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8,16, 48 & 64 bit: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, Lab.

Contrast Editor
filter controls

Here's the Contrast Editor plug-ins filtering controls. Click on the photo or the links to the right to see the plug-in at full size. The plugin divides its contrast editing into three groups:
1. General Contrast
2. Black and White Contrast w. midtone control
3. Color Contrast

In addition there are two control groups for restricting filtering to a brightness- or color-range

Example -

Gain control over
every facet of contrast

What is contrast control? A bit of photo editing theory...

Expand range?

Or don't Expand range?

The Power Retouche contrast editor gives you the option to enhance contrast with control of if, and how much, the brightness range should be expanded. You could preserve it as the original and yet still enhance contrast - I believe Power Retouche Contrast Editor is the only contrast editing system that gives you that possibility.

You can only do that if you can push the mid tones towards the extremes so there is more of the dark and light - but without making the darks any darker or the lights lighter.

Don't preserve mid tones

Preserve mid tones?

Power Retouche Contrast Editor even combines the above possibilities and lets you control range expansion and mid tone preservation at once.

Now you might wonder where color is in all that. We did, so we made a unity of all above with color and labeled it General Contrast...

The General Contrast control

General Contrast

This is Power Retouche's integration of black/white contrast with color-contrast. This slider edits contrast of hue, saturation and brightness-range while preserving the relationships between the three. The example to the right was filtered with the General Contrast at 100%.

Technically (in the terms of the Munsell color space notation) where black-white contrast moves individual colors vertically up or down a value axis, and saturation moves the individual colors horizontally along a chroma axis, our General Contrast will move individual colors diagonally along both simultaneously. This direction has no given name, though it is so central for any practical color adjustment. For the lack of a name, in either Munsell or The Uniform Color Scales of Optical Society of America, we simply named it by its apparent effect: General Contrast.

(The truth behind the lacking term is that it in reality its a bit more complex than a simple diagonal line. The visually - and optically - correct change is not achieved by a linear diagonal shift, but rather by a logarithmic curve - with curvature, start- and end-points varying from hue to hue).

See another examle of retouching with general contrast alone at the bottom of this tutorial.

Two control groups: Black/White and Color

Black/White or Color?

The Black and White Contrast controls

Black and White contrast

This determines how much change should be applied. How the contrast is changed is set by the following two sliders, so the aesthetic effect of this slider is determined by them. This sliders effect mutually enhances the effect of general contrast.

Preserve mid tones %

This slider determines how much the contrast should be changed by altering the contrast of the mid tones.

At the extreme you can split the image into just black and white. Normally you will think in terms of preserving the mid tones rather than enhancing contrast by separating them.

Expand range %

This slider determines if and how much the dynamic range should be expanded - in other words how much the contrast should be changed by making the darks darker and lights lighter.

The two sliders Preserve Mid tones and Expand Range give you control over whether the image should be hard or soft.

Balance

This slider shifts the midpoint of the image. In effect it will change the brightness of the image.

Black Alert
White Alert

If checked these two alerts will mask areas in the preview that are entirely black or entirely white. You can change the color of the alerts by clicking in the colored rectangle displaying the color of the mask.

Color contrast

This group of controls is straight forward.
Warm contrast targets warm colors (yellow, orange, red).
Cold contrast targets cold colors (cold green, cyan, blue, violet).
Red, Green and Yellow contrast target the respective colors.

When developing the filter we gathered information on what colors to target from professional digital photographers. You might ask why it's red, green, yellow, not red, green, blue. This is because the need to retouch blue is usually a matter of retouching the broader band of cold colors, and we have the "Cold contrast" slider for that. When retouching warm colors, you may often need to be able to retouch each color individually. The "Warm contrast" slider predominantly targets orange. red, orange and yellow are the colors of skin.

Retouch levels

These are common to most Power Retouche plug-ins. They let you determine the degree the filtering will be applied to lights, midtones and darks.

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 towards the bottom. The original is flat because there is not enough contrast in the foreground objects (or more exactly: more contrast in the foreground objects compared to the background). We raised general contrast, BW contrast and warm contrast. Note how much greater the depth is after this elegant retouch.

Ranges

The ranges tab opens the ranges dialogues. This is common for most Power retouche plugins.

Their controls are descibed below.

Brightness-range - value restricted filtering

Use Brightness-range

The following sliders become active when the "Use brightness-range" is checked. This set of plugin filtering controls is common to most of the PowerRetouches.

From...

This slider tells the filter not to alter areas of the image that are darker than the sliders setting (0=black, 255=white).

Up to...

This slider tells the plugin not to alter areas of the image, that are lighter than the sliders setting (0=black, 255=white).

Target

This tells the plugin which value between the dark and light limits shall be changed the most.

Softness

Softness determines to what degree the values in the range shall be edited at, and around, the target value
0% = full effect in whole range.
100% = only full effect on target value.

Mask unchanged

This checkbox is an aid to setting the limit-sliders. It applies to both the brightness-range and the color-range. When checked areas of the image that are darker than the dark limit or lighter than the light limit will be shown in the preview window as a mask-color. You can change the color of the mask by clicking in the small rectangle.

Color-range - hue restricted filtering

From... and To...

Color-range filtering - or hue restricted filtering - is common for most of the Powerretouche plug-ins. Color range will restrict filtering to colors in the range from the right side of the "From" slider to the left side of the "Up to" slider. This means that all color-selections are possible, since if you place the From slider to the left of the To... slider, then colors in between the two controls will be edited. If you place the From... slider to the right of the To... slider, then colors in between the two controls will NOT be edited.

Below is an example of settings used to block out a blue sky and how the mask appears...

Invert selection (Inv.)

This will make the sliders swap place. For example you might have set the sliders to include only reds. If you press Inv. the sliders swap place and you have selected everything but reds.

This is useful, for example, if you first want to edit selected foreground colors, then rerun the plugin to edit all other colors. The plugin remembers your settings between invocations, so on the second run just hit Inverse.

The two small colored rectangles show the selected color. If you use the brightness range the color in these two windows will become lighter or darker according to the selected range.

Example using color range