On Trial!
Well we have been asked to trial some software which promises to make the life of anyone dealing digitally with pictures much easier. We've heard it before and have been disappointed, but this bit of kit really does make life easier.
As you all know printing colour pictures chemically is a matter of understanding the colour wheel and being able to subtract the colours to compensate for the colour cast in any given film. All film manufacturers produce a filtration kit that will do just that with their brand of film. Also using modern systems the neg will be analysed, the colour mix pulled down to a 70% grey and filtration added. This assumes of course that there is a good mix of colours in the original negative. If one colour is dominant then the 70% grey will muck that about.
Being a good photographer of course doesn't mean you are necessarily good with colour casts. I see this from a lot of work I receive. A good dark room technician will look at a print and say 5cc Cyan 7cc Magenta. He sees a colour cast and can work out the filtration needed to compensate. You really cannot expect to be master of everything so I have always left my printing to the technician.
Now of course a lot of work is scanned and this in itself creates colour casts. Even the work produced by a digital camera if the white balance is not set properly, then you will have problems again. Using the usual photographic software to compensate will generally improve a cast, but quite often it will go slightly another way. Some software specific to correcting colour cast is called for. We think we have found it.
Color Pilot is software designed specifically for correcting the colour cast of your digital prints. It works like a dream, and wonderfully if you have a whole set of prints carrying the same cast, (which is likely). Once you have corrected the first you can easily correct them all by simply clicking the repeat button. It can save hours.
The first thing that strikes you about Color Pilot is how easy it is to get started. There are loads of demos where the software runs through a set of actions, while you sit back and watch. We watched each once and in no time at all we were correcting archives full of prints. We cannot stress enough just how easy this is to use. As with anything practice makes things even better. You could play with this for hours. I did!
Here I have selected a small area on the dress that is white
and told the software simply to go.
There are many different ways of tackling the cast. The best way to see a cast is to look at an area that should be white. So I found an area of the print that should be white, selected it on the print and then clicked start. The software produces a new print correcting the cast making the selected area white. Notice how the skin tones improve.
Now here I used a known colour rather than white. I selected a section of the red T shirt, then adjusted that to the shade of red I believed it should be and clicked start. Again the software made all the adjustments and produced a new print. OK so I went a bit over the top, but you can see how by small amounts of trial and error you can get there. The picture on the right was made with just one more adjustment to the shade of red and has far better skin tones that the original, looks cleaner and has just a tad more sparkle like the original before being scanned. You may prefer the first attempt at correction as it seems a nice bright sunny picture, but it's a little garish.
Once you sit down with this software I doubt you will be able to leave it alone. It's wonderful to get some help at last. Sometimes as I am sure you know you can start to lose your way completely when trying to compensate and it feels like you are going round in circles.
So here again we are using the white base. This was a set of pictures taken on quite a cheap digital camera and the white balance was a little off as you can see. Yet once I had the first print corrected it was a simple task to simply go through the whole set and correct them all using the repeat button. Of course it proves what we have always said to you, consistency is very important in your work. If all your negs are out, at least ensure they are all consistently the same.
Well Glamour Photo OnLine has really done you proud, not only can you download this software, but due to a deal we have made it is fully functional. Yes, no time limit, nothing witheld, the full working version of Color Pilot is yours for FREE. All that is left for us to say is enjoy and if you really love it like we do then why not upgrade to the even better latest version. Information on doing that is in the help menu in the sofware.
Yes Please I want to Download software now.
©Glamour Photo OnLine 2001