Digital Light & Color

An update is available to Version 8.0.268 (16-Jan-2022)

The changes (taken from the update log) are:

Added a new transformation: Color/Hue Saturation. Please see the help file for details – Transformations.pdf has not yet been updated. This transformation should be considered experimental at this point and possibly subject to change in future releases. It is based on the hue-saturation histogram and lets you make saturation, brightness and hue changes to images based on selections within the histogram.

Mobius transformation: fixed bug in calculation of Mobius function, so the color wheel is now distorted a little differently.

Added File/Re-Save command to main menu. This command is grayed out unless the current image was previously saved along with its script file and the script was subsequently reloaded. The command then saves the current image with the same name as it was saved under the last time, overwriting the previously saved version. You still get a confirmation message asking if you want to overwrite the file or choose a different pathname. Use this command after you re-work an image and want to overwrite the previous version with the new version instead of incrementing the version number and saving another copy.

Fixed a problem with an incorrect “last saved as” pathname being stored in script files in some cases. Consequently, when using pre-existing scripts, information about the pathname and date of the saved image file is now discarded when loading a script. The next time you save the image file with a script, however, the correct information will be written out and File/Re-Save should work correctly from then on.

Clone tool: “Missing source image” warning message is now issued only once, even if there are multiple missing images or strokes using the missing image.

Trying out the Mobius transformation, I notice that Shift-clicking on the Mask button has no effect.

(The Hue Saturation transformation looks promising. What a cool way to visualize the colour scheme of an image. Can you share a little more about where the idea came from?)

Fixed for next release.

PWP has had hue-saturation histograms for some time as one of the options in the Histogram tool.

I got interested in the visual construct of the hs histogram after listening to a couple of talks by Erin Babnik, the landscape photographer. She uses a third party tool to display the colors in an image and analyze them based on classical color theory. Sometimes the histogram falls mainly along a warm-cool line or perhaps accumulates in several areas which may or may not harmonize. Anyway, since I already had implemented the hs histogram in Picture Window, it seemed like a good idea to use it to manipulate color since you can see from the histogram where the predominant colors are located rather than having to guess which ones to change. This is similar in black and white to adjusting a curve while seeing the histogram behind it. I was also looking at the Nik Color Contrast Range filter which lets you apply opposite adjustments to a color and its complement. This is a rather blunt tool since it selects just based on hue and the two colors you want to separate are not always opposite each other in the color wheel. This was the idea behind allowing two independent selections so you can apply different adjustments to different parts of the image based on their hue and saturation.

I am currently working on incorporating the same type of selection based on the hs histogram as a new mask tool so the same concept can be extended to all the transformations that use masks.

Thank you for the detailed information. And for introducing Erin Babnik. She has some sublimely beautiful images on her site.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the use cases for the tool, but I'm fascinated by the visualization.