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White Balance / Highlight Recovery Manual

Installation Instructions

Mac OS X Windows
  • Download the .zip archive.

  • Unzip/un-archive the file. If your computer cannot do this, download and install a free version of Stuffit Expander to do this.

  • Move the plug-in (the file with the .plugin extension) into your Photoshop Plugins folder. The Plugins folder should be found under something similar to Applications --> Adobe Photoshop CS3 --> Plug-ins

  • Delete any old plug-in versions in your Photoshop Plugins folders.

  • Quit and relaunch Photoshop if it's already running.

  • In Photoshop, the plug-in will be found under Filter --> Colormancer

  • Download the .zip archive.

  • Unzip/un-archive the file. If your computer cannot do this, you may need to download and install a free version of WinZip or WinRar.

  • Move the plug-in (the file with the .8bf extension) into your Photoshop Plugins folder. The Plugins folder should be found under something similar to
    C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Plug-Ins\

  • Delete any old plug-in versions in your Photoshop Plugins folders.

  • Quit and relaunch Photoshop if it's already running.

  • In Photoshop, the plug-in will be found under Filter --> Colormancer

Quick Start Guide

To white balance the image, click on the Eyedropper button. Then drag-select an area of the image that should be grey or white (i.e. a neutral color). The plugin will average the values in that area to reduce noise. It will then calculate the filter parameters needed to neutralize the color cast.

You can set R, G, and B gain manually be moving the sliders or using the text input boxes. The Fine controls have a tenth of the effect of the normal gain controls to allow fine adjustment to color balance. You can use the gain controls to introduce a desired color cast, e.g. to add warmth to the image.

The Highlight Recovery setting can extract highlight detail that is normally clipped during the white balance process. 100 is maximum highlight recovery and 0 is none. You may wish to dial highlight recovery down as it may not work in all situations.

The Highlight Rolloff setting de-saturates highlights so there is a gradual transition between recovered highlight detail and normal detail. Lower settings will expose artifacts from the highlight recovery process. The recommended setting is the default (100). A setting of 0 (via text input) will disable all highlight recovery.

About White Balance / Highlight Recovery

The first step is to white balance the image. This can be done by applying gain / multiplying the channels by some constant. The R, G, and B channels are multiplied by a set of constants such that R=G=B for neutral colors.

How highlight recovery works

Applying gain on the R, G, and B channels will cause one or two of these channels to exceed white level. Normally these values above white level are clipped. However, it is possible to use this information to make an intelligent guess about the other channel(s) that did not have gain applied. The ungained channel(s) will usually contain clipped values; highlight recovery will make an intelligent guess about what the original unclipped values were. If the original image does not contain perfect white balance, then highlight recovery offers the possibility of increasing dynamic range compared to no highlight recovery. However, applying any gain to the image will raise the noise floor and decrease dynamic range to begin with.

RAW

You will get technically superior results by shooting to a RAW format and applying any white balance and highlight recovery there. This tool is for situations where you do not have a RAW file to work with.

Controls In-Depth

The R, G, and B Gain settings are internally normalized by the filter. It will only increase the gain of one or two channels, and leave the other channel(s) alone. If you need to add an extreme color cast, turn down the gain settings on the other channels. e.g. a setting of R Gain of 2X and G and B Gain of 0.1 will effectively result in gain values of 20X, 1X, and 1X respectively.

To set white balance manually, you only need to adjust the gain sliders for two of the RGB channels (not all three).

The Fine controls have a tenth of the strength of the normal controls. Total gain = Normal gain + 0.1 * fine Gain.

The Highlight Recovery setting can extract highlight detail that is normally clipped during the white balance process. 100 is maximum highlight recovery and 0 is none. You may wish to dial highlight recovery down as it may not work in all situations.

The Highlight Rolloff setting de-saturates highlights so there is a gradual transition between recovered highlight detail and normal detail. Lower settings will expose artifacts from the highlight recovery process. The recommended setting is the default (100). A setting of 0 (via text input) will disable all highlight recovery.

System requirements

Mac:

  • Adobe Photoshop CS3 or higher
  • OS X 10.4.0 or higher
  • PowerPC or Intel processor (the plug-in is a Universal binary that works on both platforms)

Windows:

  • Adobe Photoshop CS, Photoshop Elements 2, IrfanView, GIMP/Windows via PSPI, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, or higher
  • Windows XP/Vista
  • (Noise reduction only) A processor that supports SSE2 instructions. A Pentium 4, AMD64, or higher CPU will support this instruction set.

 


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Our freeware plugins: White Balance | Tint + Black and white conversion | Noise removal