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ColorBender Basics
The following links describe and give examples for the basic ColorBender operations.
There are six ColorBender Windows. The main working environment is the View Window with the control panel drawer open. The other Windows are opened when needed. There are no deeply nested menus. All operations are either directly executable with a single click, or selectable from pop up menus.
There are no extraneous "apply" buttons and all operations work at any time in any order.
Selectors allow image composition to be improved by limiting adjustments to certain regions, colors and neutrals. Selectors are better than masks and layers for composition and are far easier to use. Often, selectors used in combination can isolate specific objects for adjustments.
The four ColorBender Brightness controls are Brightness, Contrast, Shadows and Highlights. These operations are different and better than similar controls in other applications. For ColorBender, the brightness operations do not clip, do not shift color, do not alter the black point and white point, they are consistent with each other and they maintain a proper balance between neutral and color tone changes.
ColorBender adjusts Color Tone in all 8 directions without clipping. Other applications only adjust tone in two or four directions and clip.
ColorBender's unique texture control enhances or smoothes textures without altering edges or causing "halo" effects. Both edge and texture filters are automatically generated and are compatible with the automatic resampling and anti-aliasing filters.
ColorBender selectively shifts colors for any combination of colors and regions.
ColorBender Color Cast adds color to the neutrals without changing vivid colors or clipping. Different colors with different amounts can be added to the whites, grays and blacks.
Exposure problems generally give an image an overall color cast with loss of near neutral color fidelity. Skin tones are especially troublesome. ColorBender corrects these problems automatically by simply pressing a combination of three buttons.
Simply click the mouse in the vicinity of each eye within 3 seconds, and ColorBender automatically locates the centers of the eyes and removes the red while preserving highlights and non-red colors. This can be repeated until all the red eye pairs have been selected and corrected.
To resize an image, the user only needs to specify three values (aspect, size and resolution). There are a number of ways to set these using popup menus with a rich set of presets.
Rotation, Magnification and Translation can be done at any time by dragging the mouse and holding down a key. Cropping is from the output perspective where the image appears to move and change size, so the view is shown in the true output format.
Images can be transferred to and from ColorBender by Drag and Drop, Cut and Paste, or Menu Open... and Save As... Most standard formats are supported including several RAW formats, 16 bit TIFF and Adobe DNG. Monochrome images are opened as gray RGB images so they can be given color casts.
As images are processed in ColorBender, the user can, at any time, add the current settings to a save list. Later, the user can step back to any of the saved states. Groups of functions are saved independently so they can be used in different combinations.
ColorBender Print View Mode gives an accurate preview of the printed output, yet all image adjustments remain operational.
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