iCorrect® EditLab ProApp 6.0 User Guide

9a. Hue Selective Edit Tool: Setting the "Before" Handles


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The first thing you should do is position the Before hue handles. You may want to set handles at specific hues you want to edit. You may also want to set handles as "fences" to limit the range of effect of a neighboring hue edit.

There are three ways of setting Before hue handles.

The SmartColor button may be used to quickly set all six handles to the most prominent hues in the image. If there are fewer than six such hues present, any remaining handles will be placed in large gaps, to limit the range of influence of any given handle. This will already have been done if the master SmartColor Mode checkbox is checked.

For our sample image, four handles have been positioned to correspond with hues in the image: the yellow blouse and red vest of the first musician, the blue robe of the center musician, and the instruments. The remaining two handles have been positioned midway between handles to serve as fences.

The second way of setting a Before handle is to drag it to the desired location. To position a handle that isn't already active, activate it first by clicking on its Before handle. Then click again to drag it to a new position.

The third way of setting a Before handle is simply to click on something in the image. You may notice that as you move the cursor over the image, a small line is continually drawn on the hue ring showing the hue of the pixel you are pointing at. (This line is not drawn if you are pointing at a color that is near neutral because hue becomes undefined as you approach the neutral colors.)

When you click on the image, the hue of the color you are pointing to is calculated and the Before handle closest to it on the hue wheel is activated and moved to this position.

You may notice that the Before hue that is calculated does not necessarily exactly match the hue of the pixel that you clicked on. This is because every time you click on the picture, an entire region of adjacent similar pixels are used to determine the hue for the handle (similar to the way that adjacent pixels contribute to Neutral clicks, as described in the Color Balance section of this user guide).

Note that setting the Before hue handles does absolutely nothing towards changing any colors (unless an edit has already been applied to this hue handle or either of its immediate neighbors — the topic of the next section). By setting these handles, you are indicating which hues are of interest for hue selective editing — hues that you wish to alter as well as hues you wish to remain fixed.

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