[Erik]

I. An Introduction to Colour Correction

The standard procedure of colour correction is to find an area that should be neutral grey, then look in the Info palette of Photoshop (or another application) what values the pixels in this area have and adjust these to a mean value that is entered in the R,G and B channels. This quest for grey is a very personal interpretation, as many neutral areas are in reality not grey, but something close to it. Uniform: yes, but not greyed out.

The complete workflow is more complicated: most professionals need four steps to achieve the goal.

First the contrast needs to be adjusted. Not too much, but certainly not too little either. Of course this is not done with the contrast and brightness tool of the application, but with a Levels tool in which the three channels are individually set to their maximum. This results in a gapped histogram.

Secondly, an eventual colour cast must be removed. Herefore we need a curves adjustment layer on which we set neutral values for highlights, dark shadows and, eventually, a really grey object.
We also pay attention to skin tones. Why? Because we are very sensible to them, and any cast on them would destroy our correction.

In a third step, we adjust saturation.

In a fourth step we sharpen the image. But that falls outside this review. Mr. Heim has a plug-in for that called "FocalBlade", and I will review that one later.

You can do this in most applications. But, as said: for many people this is very tricky to do, and for these a plug-in like ColorWasher2 comes in very handy, most certainly because it can correct most photographs accurately in Easy-Mode. If you are a prosumer or a professional, you will be impressed by what it can do without you touching any tool or slider, and if you want to finetune (most often you'll have to admit that the solution it offers at least equals your own) or attack that difficult file it cannot do automatically, you'll find a lot of tools and options you didn't even find in Photoshop. And those you do find are outperformed by their CW2 challengers.


II. The Manual

Colorwasher comes with a very complete 60-pages thick pdf and html manual. It includes detailed instructions on how to install the software in the most commonly used applications the plug-in can work with, a good introduction to monitor calibration and an overview and an in-depth covering of its tools and options. It also includes a list with shortcuts.
I like the fact that it is written in an understandable language and comes with a lot of good advice, tips and tricks (the tenth tip for tough cases is o so true!) and that the real technical terms are as often as possible replaced by their better-known equivalent.
The manual can be printed. A critique I had on the printable version of CW1, namely that printed result is a bit chaotic because of a lack of clearly discernable titles and chapters has been taken care of. The only thing I miss a bit is a table of contents. But that is easily made if it is really needed.


III. Installing and Interface

I had no problems installing ColorWasher. Photoshop users are often treated as the main users -the plug-ins are after all called "Photoshop compatible" plug-ins- and therefore much software refers to the plug-ins folder of Adobe's flagship. Not this one: here, all applications are equal, so everyone has to browse to the plug-ins folder of her/his software whilst installing. Don't forget to do this or you will have to start again.
I did this on purpose: I installed the plug-in in the default folder, uninstalled it and then, finally, installed it in the correct folder. I didn't meet any problems.
Amongst the applications in which you can install this plug-in (andI don't want to say that these are the best, only perhaps the best known) are the inevitable Photoshop, Photopaint, PaintshopPro, Canvas and Photo Express, but also IrfanView, Freehand, Illustrator, Xara X and Righ Hemisphere Deep Paint.
As will be covered later on, the interface has two appearances: one for quick and easy mode, and one that shows all options. Changing between both is done by checking a box in the bottom left-hand corner. Quick and easy mode only shows the automatic and semi-automatic (dropdown boxes with several choices per item) settings.