Single Channel Cloning

[tomczak]

Den's link to the old Board tips section reminded me about this technique:

Single-channel Cloning/Retouching

I suggested some time ago that it would be useful for a clone tool could have an option on cloning, say, V-channel only. It's not the same, but doing that is sometimes closer to 'healing'. It's quite easy to do that already:

1) Extract 3 channels (e.g. H,S and V; when choosing first two channels, hit Apply, than OK for the third one - this way we get 3 of them extracted in one go)

2) Combine the same three channels, check Auto Preview, then do cloning or some other retouching on the channel of your choice, monitoring the Combine Channels preview.

p.s. It's a wrong section for it, but it would be really nice if the extracted channels were labelled (e.g. Untitled 13_HSV-V, Untitled 15_RGB-G etc...) - it's really easy to get lost when working with many channel windows.

Cheers.

[Winfried]

Just a little hint.
The working color space and the color space of the image must be equal.
Combining the tree channels results in an image with the working color space as its color space and not the original color space.

[tomczak]

Good point, Winfried. I've never thought about it.

Would that mean that if the image colour space and the working colour space are not equal, and I decompose the image into channels and combine them again anyway, I would need to use Profile transformation with Output Colour Profile set to the original input image colour space (not the working colour space) and Change to Profile Settings Only to keep the image profile tag the way it was?

[Winfried]

Yes, I think so.