Neutralizing Color

[Darius]

I am totally familiar with the White Balance & Color Correction functionality of PWP. With that said, I saw a Photoshop technique, wherein someone neutralized a photo that had too much of a bias toward blue (very blue skies!). He fixed this by a Filter-Average command that got the average color in that whole photo, then he too it's compliment and he finally did some kind of a "Soft Light" overlay to the photo with this compliment color. How could this be done in PWP? Also, any other PWP 'neutralizing' techniques' that are good, for which someone can give me links? Thanks!

[couman]

Darius,
Without an example, I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve, but here’s another way to selectively neutralize a color.
Using the filter transformation,
1. Use the eyedropper to select the offending color
2. Check the complement box
3. Adjust to taste using the amount and exposure compensation sliders

[den]

Something you might try that may be similar to the PS technique...

Img0 = the starting image

IMG_1577_ori_600px.jpg (53.9 KiB) Viewed 3586 times

1) click on Img0 and open the HSL Brightness Curve transform. Apply a curve [0,50] [100,50] and OK, creating Img1 where the Hue and Saturation channels have been normalized to the 50% Lightness tone plane of the HSL color space.

2) click on Img1 and Apply 3 to 5 successive Guassian Blurs with the maximum radius of 128; threshold 100%; and Amount 100%, creating Img2. This essentially creates a mean or average Hue/Saturation color at a 50% Lightness for Img0.

3) click on Img2 and click Transformation/Gray/Negative, creating Img3. This creates the compliment of Img2.

4) click on Img3 and open the Composite - Hard Light transform where Input = Img3 and Overlay = Img0; Input and Overlay Amounts = 100%; and click OK, creating Img4. This image version has neutralized colors of Img0.

IMG_1577_ori_600px-1.jpg (55.9 KiB) Viewed 3584 times

5) As a final suggestion... ...1 to 1 clone or Composite-Blend [with or without an image area mask] Img0 and Img4 for a preferred combined image version...

There is an alternative to 2) where the Mask Tool Blur radius of 1000 could be used but there are more steps as the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness channels of Img1 have to be Extracted; separately blurred, then re-Combined to create the needed Img2 version.

...A far more simplier approach may be utilizing PWP's Remap transform [with or without an image area mask] where a 65% HSV-V sky blue tone of Img0 is selected as the outer color of a color pair and the inner color is its compliment color and Tightness = 0.20 and Amount = preference...

...den...

[jsachs]

PWP does not have a built-in function to compute the average of an entire photo, although you can simulate it by resizing it very small (say 20 pixels or so wide) and then blurring it a lot (say radius 30 pixels) with Gaussian Blur. This will produce a small image of approximately solid color equal to the average of all the pixels. Once you have the average color, start the Filter transformation, use the eyedropper in the color picker to select the filter color from the small image, check the complement box, and add enough exposure compensation as necessary to bring the brightness back to normal.

As I recall Kodak used to use a similar technique to averaging the entire image in some its automatic printing kisoks to remove color casts from film images -- it works OK sometimes but can easily fail as well. PWP's auto white balance will work better in most cases as long as the lightest parts of the image should be rendered white.