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Clicking the Preferences… button
will display the Preferences dialog box:
Below we will go through each of these controls in order, to see how EditLab's behavior is affected.
As mentioned in the Introduction, EditLab's color correction can be directed to any of four purposes, and the first preference control indicates which of these four to use:
The selection made affects the appearance and behavior of the lower right button of EditLab's main window, which in turn, affects how the color correction is used. Each of the four modes is explained in Chapter 8.
The next preference control is used to indicate how you want EditLab to determine its starting color control settings:
If you start with SmartColor, then SmartColor mode will be enabled, which is then used to determine the initial color correction settings according to an analysis of the actual image. If you start with Previous Settings, then the settings for the color correction tools are recalled from the previous time that EditLab was run (and SmartColor will be disabled). If you start with Reset, all edit tool controls will be set to values that do not change the image (i.e. "null" values).
The Preferred Saturation menu influences the Saturation level that is set by the SmartColor Saturation correction.
The settings range from 0 (None; a black and white image) to 100 (Maximum; a very colorful image), with 80 being the default. SmartColor Saturation will analyze your image and set the Saturation control to a value that will either reduce or increase the saturation of your image to match your preferred saturation level.
The next two controls in this dialog influence the responsiveness of the controls throughout EditLab. If you find that the controls are too sluggish, you may want to experiment with these settings that trade off quality and feedback for speed. The responsiveness will depend on many factors, such as the speed of your computer, the amount of memory available to EditLab and the size of the EditLab window.
The Quality menu determines at what level of visual quality the preview image will be displayed on your monitor.
The settings range from 1 (lowest quality) to 8 (highest quality), with 8 (highest quality) being the default. Higher settings will, however, take longer to display, so choose a setting that matches your quality needs and the length of time that you are willing to wait.
When the Live Slider Preview checkbox is checked, the preview image is updated with every movement of the mouse as you adjust a slider.
If you have a fast enough computer, this makes it easy to find the optimal slider setting, but on a slower computer, you may find it confusing and frustrating if the updating of the display doesn't keep up with your mouse movements. Updating the preview involves a lot of calculations, especially if the master SmartColor checkbox is checked, since new automatic settings are also recalculated for each change in the slider value. When the Preview Sliders checkbox is unchecked, you can freely move a slider, but the image is not updated until you release the mouse button.
When the Show Sampled Region checkbox is checked, a brief visual feedback is given of the actual pixels sampled when you click on the image:
This is discussed in more detail in the section describing the Neutral Color Balance tool. This "flashing" gives you some feedback about what is happening during color correction. If you find this distracting, simply turn the option off by unchecking the checkbox.
Finally, the Use Largest Possible Window checkbox indicates how the EditLab window will be sized the next time the plug-in is run.
A bit of explanation is needed here. Unlike a normal stand-alone application, it is not possible for a plug-in to have a window that may be resized while the plug-in is actually running. So in order to provide a different window size, you must indicate how this should be done next time.
Moreover, note that the larger you make EditLab's window, the more memory EditLab needs. And EditLab's zooming feature increases its memory needs still further. So the name of the game is trading window size against available memory and the ability to zoom. Let's see how this is done.
If the Use Largest Possible Window checkbox is unchecked, the EditLab window will be a fixed size that will fit on a display that meets EditLab's minimum system display requirements (800 × 600 pixels). If under this setup, there is not enough memory for EditLab to run, image zooming will be temporarily disabled in an attempt to have enough memory to run at all.
If the Use Largest Possible Window checkbox is checked, the EditLab window will be the largest size that will fit on your display. If under this setup, there is not enough memory for EditLab to run, the window size will be made just enough smaller so that it will run. If the resulting window size found this way is the minimum size, image zooming may be temporarily disabled if needed to have enough to run at all.
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