Digital Light & Color

I was trying a couple of things today and couldn't seem to find a way to achieve it..

Is there a way to have a live color picker readout. II was trying to make an image adjustment to skin using curves and I could not set a picker on the skin and have it update as I made adjustments. If this is not a feature it would be awesome to be able to place the picker or multiple pickers as you can in say Rawtherapee and have them update as you make adjustments.

Secondly as I review and edit and wish to focus on a certain region lets say I zoom in and then when I go to the next transform it zooms back out. Is there a way to lock the zoom so that as you go from transform to transform to review your edit that the zoom stays the same??

There may be ways to do this and I just don't know.....

Thanks in advance....

The color picker control was not designed to be used in the way you describe. The closest thing to what you are asking for is the readout tool (accessed via the main tool bar) but this does not update automatically. Conceivably it could, but there are some design issues that would have to be worked out. Personally I do not find editing images by the numbers to be at all intuitive, and displaying a color out of context often changes the way it looks entirely. For applying say Brightness Curve to an image, if you shift-click on the input image PWP will add a new control point to the curve whose x coordinate corresponds to the brightness of the pixel you clicked on and whose y coordinate is the point on the current curve at that x coordinate. Having created this new control point, you can lighten that part of the curve by dragging it upward or darken it by dragging it downward.

There is a trick for the zooming issue, although it does not work in most cases when starting a new transformation. If you hold the Alt key down when you click on a thumbnail in the image browser to select a new image, it will display the new image at the same zoom and scroll position as the previously current image, but only if the old and new images are the same size in pixels. If the sizes are different, there is no obvious way to apply the same zoom and scroll settings that makes sense.

Okay I will try the zoom trick but I am not 100% sure I was clear. So if I have loaded an image and then applied say 4 or 5 transforms and I zoom in on the last one and then I want to backup through the transforms at that exact same zoom to evaluate the flow of the edit in that region right now I cannot. The second I go to a step above or below the preview is zoomed out. ...It would be great to be able to lock the current zoom if that is possible...I think this would be valuable

Regarding the read out. I agree your eyes should be your best tool but for tweaking skin tones or to generally evaluate how you are shifting the RGB balance in a selected area it can be useful. There are several charts with lab values for skin and it is nice to use these. I didn't see a lab tone curve so I was using r g b channels to try to bring the lab values close to what I find works well for skin tones....so I stumbled on to this as I had the "readout" open with LAB values selected for readout but I was adjusting via RGand B curves so it was a bit of a pain to go back and keep clicking the picker......in any case I am sure there are perhaps better ways to adjust skintones in PWP8 I will just have to learn them

Lab is great for identifying colors in a device independent way, but it is not a useful color space for editing since most of it is out of gamut on any monitor or printer.

I am looking at modifying the readout tool so it can continue to track changes after it has been set, but it is a little more complicated than I originally thought.

For editing skin tones, check out Selective Color Correction. Once you create a control point for the skin, you can drag in toward or away from the center of the color wheel to adjust saturation, or clockwise or counterclockwise to adjust hue, or adjust the brightness change slider to lighten to darken them. All of this without affection other colors in the image.

For the next release, I reworked the Readout tool so that, under certain conditions, it continues to update when you change the image it last sampled. This now lets you track changes as the last sampled location as you vary the transformation settings or change any of the upstream images.

Thanks so much seemed to work with curves but not selective color. As soon as I went to the cube to select a color the readout lost focus or so it seemed....

You can get focus back by clicking on the caption of the Readout window. When you click on the transformation dialog box, it gets focus and uses clicks on the image to set a new control point.