Curves/Curves+ eye-dropper enhancement?

[StephanP]

Hi,

Here's iStockphoto Tip of the Week 05.27.2008, which describes how to use the Photoshop Curves tool for highlighting/darkening certain area's of an image.

I particularly like the way the eye-dropper has been integrated into the Curves tool.

Would this be an interesting enhancement to the Curves, or Curves+ tool?

Stephan

Many beginner designers open the Curves tool, slide the point left or right, close the box and often undo the change. Once you master the subtleties of the Curves tool, it will be your most powerful tool for controlling tonality and color regardless of whether your image is too light or too dark.

Here are some Curves tips the iStock design team picked up from the Kelby Training PhotoShop CS3 conference today in Calgary. Think of Curves as a blind on a window. When the blind is all the way down, there's no light or total blackness, when it's all the way up you have maximum light or white.

1. If there's an area of the image you would like to darken to bring out the detail of a shot, open Image>Adjustments>Curves. Then click and hold the eye-dropper tool to see the area you want to lighten, noted by the hollow circle moving on the graph.

2. As you are using the eye-dropper control and click (PC) or command and click (Mac) and this will create a first point (Point A) on your Curves graph. From here you want to drag that point down (not left or right) to darken it. You may notice that this darkens the rest of your image, but don't worry.

3. To correct this extra darkness, create a new point (Point by clicking in the Curves graph just under Point A. Point B is your fixing point and you should move that point ever so slightly, keeping it beneath Point A, until the tonal range is to your liking.

[RyuinfinityPDN]

We already have an eyedropper for curves.

[barkbark00]

No we don't...

This would actually be cool. However, I don't see Rick making the change, as there is no way to "touch" the canvas from inside an effect dialog. The effect dialog takes the focus.

Maybe Pyro could add a live preview thumbnail(?) on which we could use a faux-eyedropper...

[Mike Ryan]

Curves is used to map color channels across an image, not a particular color :wink:

[barkbark00]

Curves is used to map color channels across an image, not a particular color :wink:

Not sure, but it sounds like you are questioning the usefulness of this feature...

The way I see it is as follows; if a legitimate photo-manip app has a feature that is getting featured by a legitimate stock photo website, I think it warrants some investigation...

BTW, the purpose of this feature is to influence the adjustment of the curve based on a region of the data to be modified. Sounds sound to me...

[Mike Ryan]

You cant create color channels though. An example of this would be the CMYK mode in Curves+, it doesnt work nearly as functional as the average RGB mode.

[barkbark00]

@Mike, Come back in from left field and read the first post.

Have you used this feature in PS? I have. It's nice.

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Here is a little insight into how it would work; Open Curves(+), with the color-picker/eye-dropper click on a location in the image that you want to adjust, drag the mouse to the left or right to adjust that color's location in the curve. What does this have to do with "creating color channels"...?

[Mike Ryan]

Oohhh! Thank you BarkBark00, I could have sworn this post was about creating channels for adjusting in Curves :? I just used this feature in PS, and it seems pretty useful

[StephanP]

I'm glad we're on the same page again.

I've no experiences with the described PS feature, so I humbly step out of the discussion again.

Stephan