Viewing color is an art. Many people who use graphics programs to fix their pictures (either digital or film) or create designs are not professional artists but are hobbyists enjoying the creativity of photography or other artistic endeavors. For these people color correction can be an absolute frustration especially if the original picture has a definite color cast or the lighting did not do justice to the subject.

iCorrect EditLab is a program that will take the frustration away and give the non-professional the ability to color correct their photographs and designs quickly and easily. iCorrect is a color correction and color editing filter plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and other popular imaging programs. It has the ability to make global color corrections based on an automatic analysis of the image, analyzing certain “memory” colors such as skin tones, sky, and foliage that the user identifies in the image, dialog control settings, and Photoshop’s color management setup. iCorrect can work automatically, manually, or the two options can be combined.

How it Works

Since iCorrect is a plug-in that works both in Windows and Macintosh versions of Photoshop and the other editing programs the installation instructions that come with the program for either operating system are complete and thorough. It becomes installed under the Filters menu in Photoshop.

Once iCorrect has been installed, open the image, select the Filters menu and the image should now appear in its own window complete with the iCorrect menu.

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Step 1: Color balancing with neutrals

iCorrect introduces a concept that they call color balancing with neutrals. This the methodology used for the Auto mode. You can also refine it by picking neutral colors to further refine the color balance. Neutral colors include snow, paper, clouds, clothing, teeth, car tires, asphalt, cement, interior walls, tree bark, and ice among others. iCorrect also gives you the option of using sliders to set the RGB, an option that I found considerably harder to control.

Step 2: Setting Black & White points

The second step is to set the black and white extremes for your image. The auto mode does a very good job most of the time. If you want to tweak the blacks or whites you click on either a white or black part of the image, iCorrect will recognize what it is, and then will reset the point on the slider to the appropriate number, or you can move the slider.

Step 3: Brightness, contrast, and saturation

All these preferences can be adjusted in the same way: moving the slider bar in the appropriate direction. In a manner similar to automatic cameras iCorrect uses a center-weighted metering system to adjust the brightness of the image. iCorrect does not adjust the contrast in Auto mode leaving that preference to the user. In the Auto mode iCorrect will adjust the saturation, but the user can change that as well.

Step 4: The hue selection tool

Even the tutorial acknowledges that “this tool may seem to be the most intimidating of the set.” It tries to make precise adjustments to specific colors in the image without affection other colors that have already been fixed. It comes with three specific buttons for adjusting skin tone, foliage, and sky. It is suggested that use that feature first to do adjustments on these items.

Just click on the item, for example skin tone, and then click on the skin tone button. This should “fix” the skin tone.

You can also manually correct individual colors. Click on the individual color that you wish to correct. When you do that you will automatically see the color selected on the color wheel. A dot appears on the inside small color circle. That represents the current color selected. To change it you move the small circle on the outside of the color wheel in the direction that will approximate the “corrected” color. At the same time you can also change the brightness and/or saturation of that particular color by moving the sliders in the appropriate direction. You should be aware that since there is no masking, any other places in the image that the hue appears will also be changed.

Documentation
EditLab comes with documentation of 21 pages as a PDF file on disk. The documentation is very complete and there are even help files that will pop-up when your are using iCorrect within Photoshop. Additionally there is a very helpful Tour on their Web site.

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