HDR DeNoise: Advanced Image Settings

Photographic Print Toning

Photographic Print Toning simulates a chemical process that replaces the silver contained in the photo emulsion by a toner or another metal. This process usually adds two tones to black and white photographic prints: one for the deep shadows and one for the highlights. Popular print tonings are: sepia, selenium, gold and platinum.

Unlike the real world process, the Photographic Print Toning in PhotoEngine can also work with color photos.

Enabling Photographic Print Toning:

Scroll the panels located on the right of the screen to display the Photographic Print Toning panel
Click on the Enable checkbox located at the top left of the panel
Click again to disable

Editing shadow and highlight tones:

Click and drag the horizontal slider of the left Color Wheel slider to set the shadow tone hue
Click and drag the circular slider of the left Color Wheel slider to set the shadow tone hue
Click and drag the horizontal slider of the right Color Wheel slider to set the highlight tone hue
Click and drag the circular slider of the right Color Wheel slider to set the highlight tone hue

First set the Saturation slider to zero to simulate the regular print toning of a black and white photo. The Saturation slider is located in the Load Dynamic Panel.

Editing shadow and highlight Mix:

Drag the Mix slider located at the bottom of the panel

The Mix value defines the balance between shadow and highlight toning. When Mix has a negative value, most of the image is toned with the shadow tone. When Mix has a positive value, most of the image is toned with the highlight tone.

Brightness Curve

The Brightness Curve is a powerful tool. Use it to fine tune the shadow, mid and highlight tones of your image.

Editing the brightness curve:

Scroll the panels located on the right of the screen to display the Brightness/Brightness curve
Click anywhere in the curve to add a new point
Drag a point or a tangent (arrow) to change the shape of the curve.
To delete a point, click on a point and press the Delete-key or right-click and select Delete Selected Point

Trick:

If you want to work on the shadows only, add one or two points to the middle and top portions of the curve. This will lock the upper part of the curve. Do the reverse when working on the highlights.

Saturation Curve

The Saturation Curve is a unique feature of PhotoEngine. Conceptually, it works like a regular brightness curve but in the saturation domain. The input is the original saturation of the image (horizontal axis). The output is the edited saturation (vertical axis). The shape of the curve determines how the input saturation is mapped to the output saturation.

The bottom left of the curve controls the pixels with a low saturation; the upper right portion controls pixels with a high saturation. Here is an example:

Click on the middle of the curve to add a point
Drag the top right tangent to an horizontal position
Drag the top right point to the bottom

The shape of the curve (see screen shot below) now maps highly saturated pixels to de-saturated ones. This means that saturated pixels are now in black and white.

By editing other sections of the curve, you can selectively saturate or de-saturate portions of the edited image.

Editing the saturation curve:

Scroll the panels located on the right of the screen to display the Saturation/Saturation curve
Click anywhere in the curve to add a new point
Drag a point or a tangent (arrow) to change the shape of the curve.
To delete a point, click on a point and press the Delete-key or right-click and select Delete Selected Point

Color Equalizer

The Color Equalizer works just like an audio equalizer. Instead of modifying bass or treble, it acts on the various hues of the edited photo. The Color Equalizer can create a large range of effects. Here are a few examples:

Decrease the brightness of a blue sky without affecting the other colors of the photo
Slightly de-saturate a lawn that appears too green (a common occurrence)
Convert a photo to black and white except for objects with a red hue.
Shift the color of car from blue to red

The Color Equalizer is split into three parts:

Hue/Saturation
Hue/Luminance
Hue/Hue

Hue/Saturation:

Use the Hue/Saturation curve to increase or decrease the saturation of pixels with a given hue.

Hue/Luminance:

Use the Hue/Luminance curve to increase or decrease the luminance of pixels with a given hue.

Hue/Hue:

Use the Hue/Luminance curve to shift the pixels with a given hue to another hue, such as orange to red, blue to green, etc.

Editing the Hue/Saturation curve:

Scroll the panels located on the right of the screen to display the Hue/Saturation curve
Drag a point vertically to change the shape of the curve.

The Hue/Luminance and Hue/Hue curves work the same way.

To learn more about curve edition, read: User Interface Main Controls.

Comment:

The Color Equalizer is also a powerful tool to convert a photo to black and white. The process is as follows:

First set the Saturation slider to zero to convert to black and white
Use the Hue/Luminance curve to increase or decrease the luminance based on the original color

With this approach you can, for instance, darken a blue sky in a black and white photo.

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