Curvemeister Forum

Hi Mike,

I'm being laid-low by some bug at the moment, that is doing the rounds around the village, and in order to be distracted I've been researching and writing pages on my web site for our village PhotoGroup. 

They can not afford cm and so I've found them SmartCurve http://www.broadhurst-family.co.uk/lefteye/MainPages/images/smartcurve.jpg , which for a learner is an exciting product. 

Although it appears to have a fairly inaccurate histogram, it is dynamic which they all thought was very informative.  Am I right in thinking that if one kept an array of the originally drawn histogram, it would be a relative piece of cake to have an option of being dynamic?

The other feature this program has is to be able to draw curves in 3 modes - curve, straight & hand-drawn.  Can you think of anyway that this might be a useful thing to do?

Chris

[re smartcurves]
> Although it appears to have a fairly inaccurate histogram, it is dynamic which they all thought was very informative.
>  Am I right in thinking that if one kept an array of the originally drawn histogram, it would be a relative piece of
> cake to have an option of being dynamic?

Yes, curving an existing histogram is an efficient operation.  The software can run the indices of the bins through the curve, and merge any overlapping values to get the new histogram.  Curvemeister does this to generate a dynamic histogram of the RGB and CMYK master curves.

> The other feature this program has is to be able to draw curves in 3 modes - curve, straight & hand-drawn. 
> Can you think of anyway that this might be a useful thing to do?

Hand drawn curves can be useful in some situations, for example when cleaning up fringes around an object, where you want a sharp cutoff.  I can't think of much use for a straight curve, but that could just be my own lack of imagination.

I should probably mention that I, personally, think that the histogram is a poor tool for beginner's to start off with, or for experts to use either for that matter.  The reason is that it can be very misleading because it gives no indication of which parts of your image qualify as shadow or highlight points.  It is always better to adjust by looking at image color values than the histogram.

That said, I added the histogram to Curvemeister, and will continue to improve it, for one simple reason: customers asked for it, and I always try to do what my customers want.