Idaho Airships, Inc.

I’ve spent a bit of time with the demo version of Curvemeister, and respectfully recommend that any member of PAPA who will be at my presentations in Southern California (either the 10/07 Regional or 2/08 International) purchase and familiarize yourself with Curvemeister.

Mike has some very thorough tutorials available on his website, along with a forum for questions, exercises, and contests. It appears that support for Curvemeister is as progressive as the application.

The cardinal reasons for my adoption of Curvemeister are:

• It’s ability to manipulate Contrast and/or Luminance easily-with comprehensive graphic dialogues, and without significant uncommanded saturative influence. My testing is cursory and not as intelligent as Mike’s input will be. This capability alone is absolutely crucial in haze resolution and is leading me to reformulate my preferred haze resolution technique.
• The CM dialogue boxes and graphics are much more comprehensive that Photoshop’s native features. The ability to critique and adjust all Channels in discreet display/control windows is deeply appreciated.
• The control over neutral tones is comprehensive and to my observation, extremely effective. Existing Light photographers should be able to streamline their workflow, perhaps profoundly, with just that capability. Although the demo version does not allow the saving of Curves, it should be possible to construct Curves in various working spaces (e.g. RGB, Lab), and then automate their application for differing solutions. I will also be interested to see if any of the Curvemeister Curve species are usable within PhotoShop Curves (I admit to not even knowing this yet). CM will load PS Curves (.acv).

Because of the very challenging nature of aerial imagery (such as the great majority of the Histogram being centered in the middle 1/3 of the Histogram Scale, with a significant specular spike in the 230+ range), I’d recommend that someone post such an unusually difficult image to the Curvemeister site and give their operatives a chance to experiment with it. It is entirely possible that someone will develop a solution or elements to a solution that we haven’t considered.

An unretouched RAW capture. Good luck without a clean sensor, the Lab Gamut and Blending Modes!

Concerning technical use, to the best of my knowledge there is no liability in manipulating a working space within another, or multiple other working spaces. For example, there should be no significant image degradation when adjusting Luminance in Lab, Saturation in HSB, and Contrast in RGB on an aRGB or sRGB image even working apart from classic “nondestructive” techniques such as Adjustment Layers. Using various gamuts, all of which far exceed aRGB (and especially sRGB) simply won’t truncate image color values during excursions out of or in to the assigned profile, and shouldn’t produce a tangible conversion math inaccuracy. Mike may be willing to provide further guidance on the matter.

CM does not work in an Image Layer converted to a Smart Object, or in classic Adjustment Layers. I am considering a variety of possible workarounds including exporting Layers to external documents as I do with Layer Masks. It’s easily automated.

Finally, I strongly recommend that individuals who adopt Curvemeister familiarize themselves with the Softproofing and Gamut Warning features in Photoshop. The added control is analogous to being put on a 150 horsepower motorcycle…you can get yourself into a bind fairly quickly. Always keep in mind that the quality of output is your goal-meaning, the result of applying your output profile-not how the image appears during preparation on your monitor. We’ll cover those conversions in a subsequent post.

L