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DECEMBER 22, 2003 Adobe Photoshop CS
New image manipulation functions and effects In the area of new tools, Photoshop CS introduces several new functions that are, at time, nearly miraculous in what they can do, at other times just plain useful. We'll start with one of the less publicized new features, called "Match Color." If you've ever tried to create a color map in Photoshop, you know the hoops you had to jump through to accomplish it: Convert your source image to indexed color, generate a color palette from it, convert your target image to indexed color and then apply the color map, all the while scrunching up your image to a total of eight bits for the privilege. The new version, however, lets you simply take an image and apply its color to another image (or portion of an image) to match colors easily, an especially useful feature for compositors working with files that were shot under different lighting conditions and that would otherwise require a lot of color correction time.[an error occurred while processing this directive]  So, for example, you can take any single image and apply the colors from another image to get color variation. The examples below show a butterfly that has been mapped with the colors of four different source images.  This works in a way similar to using a gradient map adjustment layer, except that the color mapping produces smoother results because the colors are indexed automatically prior to the application of the source image colors. Another new image manipulation tool is Shadow/Highlight. This new tool performs complex image manipulations under the hood and provides you with a simple front end for getting the job done quickly. Essentially it allows you to pull detail our of excessively bright or dark areas of your images, details you might not even know were in your file. And it does this through a simple interface, allowing you easily to select the amount of detail you want to draw out of the highlight and shadow regions.  It also provides more advanced (and extensive) parameters for fine-tuning the extraction of detail.  I've already spent four pages covering this feature in a previous article, so I won't repeat myself here. You can find this exploratory tutorial here. I will add that Shadow/Highlight does affect the range of your image because it lightens shadows and attempts to neutralize highlights, so it may not be perfect for every application. But it does do a fantastic job uncovering areas of your image obscured by shadows, and it does about as well as can be expected with highlights. (Keep in mind that with highlights, there may not be any data whatsoever available for recovery. So bracketing your images and applying a plugin like Blend Exposures from Reindeer Graphics' Optipix collection is still the better option when possible.) Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Content Mastering • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Game Developer • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • DVD Creation • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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